David Fincher's Se7en (1995) opens with a serial killer who organizes his murders around the seven deadly sins. The first detective, Somerset (Morgan Freeman), is methodical, well-read, days from retirement. The second, Mills (Brad Pitt), is angry, new to the city, married to a wife he loves more than he understands. They are tracking a man who calls himself John Doe.
Doe leaves clues. Each crime scene is meant to teach. The seventh sin he commits, against Mills, is wrath.
The Word on the Wall
The fifth murder is pride. The victim is a model whose face has been disfigured. She has been given a choice — call for help (and live disfigured) or die quickly. Above the bed, in lipstick, the killer has left a single word — PRIDE. He never writes out a verse; the film's crime scenes are labeled, not annotated. But the sentence behind the label is one most viewers can finish from memory:
The verse is famous because it is shorter than its descendants. The English-speaking world has condensed it to pride goes before a fall, missing two of the verse's three nouns. The Hebrew lays out the architecture more carefully: pride, destruction, haughtiness, fall. Two pairs. Two collapses. The first is internal — destruction comes first, before any external fall is visible.
This is the film's theology. The deadly sins do not strike from the outside. They have already destroyed something inside the person before the world catches up.
What the Killer Cannot Quote
The film's twist is that Doe is not the only character ruled by a verse. The detectives are too. Mills, by the end, has been pulled into committing the seventh sin — wrath. Doe has manipulated him by murdering his wife and revealing it on a desert road in the final confrontation.
Doe assigns himself the sin of envy — I tried to play your life, and I couldn't. But the sin Mills commits is wrath, and the verse that fits is older than Proverbs:
"And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground."
Mills is becoming Cain. The film does not name the verse. It does not need to. The structure has been there since the fourth chapter of the Bible — that the brother's blood crying from the ground is louder than any sin written on a wall.
Write It Out
Copy the verse out for yourself — just the half-line: Pride goeth before destruction. By the time you finish it, you notice the order: the pride comes first. What destroys a person is rarely what they think will. The deadly sin most often missing from the list is the sin of trying to teach others theirs.
The killer is dead. The detective is in handcuffs. The words on the walls have outlasted both of them — and the verses behind those words are older still.