Seven
More than The Silence of the Lambs, Seven launched a mostly risible trend of late 90s serial killer thrillers that mimicked Fincher’s grimy neo-noir style and the invariably disgusting fetishes that spice up the villain’s dossier. Yet none of the film’s successors could hope to equal the meticulousness of his direction or the bruised humanity that makes its characters such affecting and ultimately tragic figures. That the rain-soaked urban setting has no name gives Seven a unique power, as if this city of unshakable despair and moral rot could be a stand-in for any other on its worst day. Though Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt sound like stock partners in a detective procedural – one a world-weary, seen-it-all veteran, the other a brush, impetuous newcomer – they develop a soul-stirring bond that makes the gruesome shock of the climax all the more a gut punch. Fincher was left for dead after Alien 3. One film later, he was a major new director. Scott Tobias
The Game
Perhaps not as much as an over-the-top mindfuck as Fincher classics like Seven and Fight Club, The Game stands out in the director’s oeuvre for its comparative restraint – arguably making it a more precise achievement. Nicholas Van Orton (played astutely by Michael Douglas) is a suit with far more money than empathy and connection in his life, but of course all of that changes when he gets a strange birthday gift from his brother – entry into a mysterious game. As the lines between real and fake become porous and confused, Van Orton’s life swings increasingly out of control, until the denouement, which is absolutely enthralling in spite of being predictable. Here Fincher explores his frequent themes of identity and rebirth in a way that’s much less sinister than in other films, finding a balance that is at once dark and life-affirming. If films like Fight Club and Gone Girl are just a little too heavy, The Game offers the same highs without quite as many grotesque lows. Veronica Esposito
Fight Club
Look, the best David Fincher movie is Zodiac – it’s not even close. But the David Fincher movie I’ve undoubtedly seen the most times is Fight Club, his 1999 provocation that’s been on an incendiary-then-misunderstood loop for nearly a quarter-century at this point. The film version of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, in which an unnamed and disaffected yuppie (Edward Norton) is drawn into the anarchic worldview of super-affected iconoclast Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), reps Fincher’s funniest work. Though he’s become known for his grim exactitude (both indulged and self-satirized in his new movie The Killer), Fight Club admits that Fincher’s style also lends itself well to just plain showing off, and as such convinces you it might go anywhere, even if you’ve already watched it six or seven times. That’s part of Tyler’s, and the movie’s, cleverly insidious charm – to put on a show of rebellion so irreverent and cool-looking that you don’t notice the (quoth the CG penguin) “slide” into fascism. Yet despite sloganeering that’s suckered countless point-missing MRAs, the Pixies-scored hand-holding of the movie’s ending is also one of Fincher’s sweetest. His later projects would have a greater singularity of focus, but there’s something to be said for Fight Club’s range: satire, brutality, catchphrases, slapstick, dire warnings, wounded love story. Jesse Hassenger
Panic Room
Fincher capped his spectacular 90s run of existential noirs with a pressure-cooked thriller that rings with Y2K paranoia and strips cat-and-mouse tropes to the bone. Jodie Foster is Meg, and a young Kristen Stewart is her Razor-scootering tween in a Sid Vicious tee who really, really needs her diabetes medicine as the family hides from squabbling crooks in their doomsday-prepped panic room. Foster does more acting in that 6ft-by-14ft bolthole than some do in a lifetime, and she has rarely been more flat-out fun to watch as an artsy divorcee turned Ellen Ripley of the Upper West Side, jerry-rigging explosives, setting booby traps and slamming a crook’s hand in ballistic steel. Amid the squeamish shocks, quieter moments linger, such as when Stewart signals SOS through an air vent and the camera whips through the guts of the house to the rain lashing its bricks. It could be one of Fincher’s best images: the desperate hope of a kid, spelled out in watts. Owen Myers
Zodiac
Fincher tends to build movies around storytellers: from the murderers who sensationally stage-manage their prey in Seven and Gone Girl to the writers pursuing truth in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Mank. There are versions of all those characters in his epic, propulsive and all-consuming masterpiece Zodiac, a true crime thriller measuring the shift in America from the moment murder became pop culture. Zodiac isn’t just about the titular serial killer stoking his own ego in the papers. It follows the cops, media, “concerned” citizens and even a cartoonist who try to solve the crimes and tell the tale, perhaps only to become part of it. Few film-makers could so deftly weave the multiple threads, clues and suspect lists as Fincher does, chasing obsessive characters down the rabbit hole without loosening his grip over the narrative. Fincher’s films are known for how air-tight and controlled they are. That remains true of his aesthetic in Zodiac, but the film feels different. It stands apart for its refusal to arrive at anything conclusive, for embracing fissures and doubts, for understanding that it’s not a “whodunnit”, but “who tells it best”. Radheyan Simonpillai
The Social Network
In the decade and change since its release, David Fincher’s account of Facebook’s founding has become less astute about modern history in its particulars, and more so in its broad strokes. We now know Mark Zuckerberg to be a charmless salamander rather than a brooding genius quick with a cutting one-liner, and his principled stand about keeping the site ad-free feels quite remote, but Fincher and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin were dead-on about the consuming need of embittered Silicon Valley nerds to gain acceptance among the social elite. The pathology of self-pitying masculinity laced with misogyny has become a fact of online life, and however rooted in telegenic fictions, Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of the Zuck truthfully balances the mix of superiority and inferiority complexes that drives keyboard jockeys to desperately seek the approval of people they consider beneath them. The final image, a pouting Zuckerberg sitting alone as he hits refresh until he gets a response to his latest post, bears more present-day relevance as a psychologically incisive look at a different tech titan with skin like rice paper, his mission to buy all the friends anyone could ever want all too familiar to Twitter users. Charles Bramesco
Gone Girl
It seemed like an unusual union at the time. The acclaimed auteur who’d amassed praise and awards attention for telling male-led stories of both the Zodiac killer and the origins of Facebook taking on the inescapable pop phenom that every other person, from your mum to your friend to your mum’s friend, was reading. But in Gone Girl, Fincher sniffed out what was so deviously compelling about Gillian Flynn’s irresistible page-turner, outside of its twisty plot. It was a cynical, and wickedly funny, takedown of the performance of gender and marriage played out on an absurd national stage, a clever, bitter update of Richard Yates’s equally bleak Revolutionary Road with added Us Weekly headlines. What would happen if all the gristle from your behind-closed-doors relationship was suddenly made public? What would people think? Who would be the winner? Can there ever really be a winner anyway? It’s Fincher’s most supremely entertaining movie, a sour crowd-prodder with a for-the-ages turn from a ferocious, frightening Rosamund Pike and a staggeringly bleak ending that posits that the only thing more terrifying about being trapped with a spouse you hate is being trapped there with your baby too. Benjamin Lee
