The Seventh Victim isn’t the most satisfying of Val Lewton’s great
films - the narrative feels overly condensed in some ways and oddly cluttered
in others (injudicious editing may apparently have played a part in this) –
and yet it may leave the most complexly troubled aftertaste of any of them.
There’s nothing supernatural in the film, but it’s suffused with a longing to
transcend and escape – in its most benign form into the kind of playful poetry
that attaches a narrative to a spotlight on the skyline; more darkly, into devil
worship, although the adherence to Satan seems less significant than the unity
of the group itself, and of the meting out of the death penalty to those who
break its rules. Released in 1943, the film doesn’t explicitly reflect on the
war, but it feels gripped throughout by threat, by a danger of being undermined
from within by collaborators with an external enemy, and by persistent
uncertainty about the best form of response. The ending is particularly bleak –
Jacqueline, whose unexplained disappearance drives the early part of the
narrative (her younger sister comes to New York in search of her, rapidly
becoming suffused in Jacqueline’s world to the point of falling in love with
her husband), escapes the pressure from the cult to become the “seventh victim”
of its fatal doctrines and walks out alive, only to succumb on the same night
to her recurring obsession with suicide. This doesn’t quite mark the film as an
exercise in mere futility – other characters follow a more positive arc – but
the film is much more an exercise in capture than in escape; eeriest of all is
the sense that Jacqueline’s action constitutes a sort of triumphant fulfilment
of destiny, insofar as she died on her own gloomy terms, not on anyone else’s.
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