If you haven’t seen either of the movies involved in this video and story, then you should know that there are plenty of spoilers to be found here. And, well, you probably deserve to have both of them spoiled. Keyser Soze!
Here at Cinema Blend, we’ve seen some crazy fan theories roll crookedly across these metaphorical halls, linking the Pixar Universe together and positing a family of James Bonds. But indie filmmaker Tony Sebastian Ukpo is theorizing that two completely different films from 1995, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects and David Fincher’s Se7en, are connected through each film’s villain. One is presented as a legendary criminal mastermind while the other is a methodical sadist inspired by society’s moral downgrading. Could they be the same person?
So, this is an explanation that would take less than a minute to lay out, so having the video play out over nine minutes is kind of grating, as I was waiting for some deeper revelations to be made here, but what’s there is pretty good. And Usual Suspects was released a month before Se7en, so it’s like they were trying to tell us something just by doing that. I’m guessing at the end of the latter, Soze’s right hand man Kobayashi dropped him off at the "Sloth" victim’s apartment for that year-long bedridden ordeal. In fact, I bet if I went back and watched Singer’s film again, I could find different clues in Agent Kujan’s office that lead to John Doe’s crimes, like his cabinet full of spaghetti sauce and a copy of Merchant of Venice in a desk drawer.
As is, the credible evidence comes down to each character being called the Devil, and each of them wearing a hat and a long coat at some point. Given Detective Somerset is also wearing a hat and long coat in the scene being used, that’s a slightly weaker argument. Unless part of Doe's motivation is just looking like everyone else around him. In that case, fashion bingo!
You know what I think happened? I think Brad Pitt’s character in 12 Monkeys, released in January 1996, got angry that Kevin Spacey beat him for the Supporting Actor Oscar that year and used the time machine in his film to go back and become Detective Mills so that he’d be able to catch Soze/Doe and kill him. It could have been anyone’s head in that box; this was about awards revenge.
Through his Vertigo Heights Films, Ukpo has released a handful of features, shorts and documentaries. Check out a trailer for his spooky-looking 2011 serial killer thriller Random 11.
