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jvivian-4
Reviews
The Last Seven (2011)
London's geezer theology thriller
I'm amazed that some of the criticism here is so trenchant. An interesting film that is very thought provoking, the director does not appear to have many films already in the can, so this is a very encouraging start. As a Londoner I found the footage fascinating and kept thinking when did they shoot that? How did they manage to get all those empty shots of the city? It must have been very early. It is a theological film that has some Cloverdale like moments of horror and reflecting on the end it probably owes a lot to Jean Paul Sartre's Huis Clos (instead of 3 you have 7) and Dante. It's not easy to understand, and I am still left afterwards somewhat bemused- I think this reflects on the naivety of the scriptwriting and a conception of a "Horror" Christianity that seems to be a complete rejection of the New Testament. - love, forgiveness?
The plot cannot be told or even slightly intimated at but the release blurb and newspapers are all calling it, confusingly, a "post- apocalyptic geezer thriller". Unfortunately, it's precisely the "geezer" quality about it in the acting of Tamer Hassan and Danny Dyer that spoils it for me. That said the fact that a Romanian woman, who actually gets to speak Romanian, is one of the 7 is also a strange choice. Not sure what this says about multicultural London. Still I found it a very stimulating film, a very unusual idea and for a low budget quite amazing, and if the director Imran Naqvi decides to do something very similar again, perhaps examining and exploring the same theme with the precepts of another religion it could be even better and maybe even more topical? Last Seven II anybody?