Se7en [1995] was set in Night City.

Greeting Choombas! I was rewatching Se7en/Seven the other day and I was thinking closely about the setting of the movie. For those that don't know, the writer and director made a conscious decision to make the location of the film as ambiguous as possible to help further disorient the audience.

However, I've done a bit of a deep dive here because I am determined to know where this iconic movie took place. I'll try to break it down.

Timing:

Despite the deliberate ambiguity, if you look closely, you can infer based on the style, music, and cars that the movie is set in/around the late 80s or early 90s.

Coronado City/Night City

According to the wiki:

Richard Night, a successful businessman who during the early 1990s was concerned by the violence and disruption of the impending Collapse, saw himself in an unique position to deal with the forthcoming issue. Working mainly on corporate-funded projects under a notorious company known as Halsey, Ferris and Night, Richard was dreaming to create his own ideal city.

It is highly likely that the out of control crime ravaging the country, not least of which being the John Doe's sermon, would have helped ignite a moral panic across the country, inflaming and dividing an already crumbling nation.

Geography/Climate

This is the real sticking point. Most people viewing the film for the first time probably naturally assumed the film was set in New York, or, perhaps, Seattle. Between the dingy everything, the constant rain and grey, rampant crime, and dilapidated set pieces, this movie screams dystopian New York. At one point, Tracy talks about having lived "upstate" which, as a New Yorker, I can tell you, is how people in NYC discuss anything north of Westchester County.

However, at the end of the film they drive an hour of out town and they are in a damned desert!

For those of you who don't know, there isn't a desert within 2,000 miles of NYC. So... which major cities are within an hour of desert?

• Los Angeles - this is the most likely answer (and where the movie was filmed)

• Phoenix - highly unlikely, first because in the late 80s/early 90s, Phoenix was more of a giant suburb than a big city, and again, if Phoenix ever got that much rain, the city would probably wash away.

• Albuquerque - same problem as Phoenix, but magnified.

• Las Vegas - if you've watched ten minutes of Seven, you know that it isn't set in Vegas.

• San Diego - same as Vegas, there's no way anything in San Diego looks half as nasty as any of the set pieces in Seven.

• San Francisco - not really an hour's drive to the desert, but even so, SF is far too pretty (and hilly) to have been the location of the Seven killings.

Lastly, and most important, when Somerset is reading John Doe's diaries, he specifically makes reference to John Doe having an interaction with a stranger ON THE SUBWAY.

In 2025, the United States has maybe 2.5 real subways in the entire country. This rules out all of the cities listed above, and again, points to New York City as the only place one might credibly have an experience that weird/nasty on a subway car.

Macabre crimes

Few would argue the crimes depicted in Seven are ghastly beyond compare. You may recall Somerset, when talking with R. Lee Ermey, discusses a man who was out walking his dog, gets robbed, and then the assailant gouges both of the victims eyes out so he cannot identify him. That's some fucked up, pre-Night City level criminal activity if you ask me, so it is sort of in character as a "prequel" story. The entire River storyline seems like a John Doe origin story written by Andrew Kevin Walker (if you don't believe me, check out his other major film, 8MM).

So where does that leave us / Conclusion

Based on all the available evidence, the mood, the architecture, the climate, the surrounds, the available options...

I have to conclude that the movie Se7en was, in fact, set in Night City, nee Coronado City. It is near a desert, it gets consistent rain (don't ask me how), could've conceivably had a subway system, even back then, it has a violent history, and its residents could credibly describe "upstate" as Northern California. It makes more sense than any other American city, and the motifs of both stories mesh shockingly well.

Hope you enjoyed, I have to delta!