"7 Days" ("Les 7 jours du talion") is a French film that is both a “rape/revenge” film and a “torture movie,” as the entire movie contains of prolonged torture.  A man abducts his young daughter’s rapist and killer and tortures him for a week before executing him.

The lead character is a doctor whose young daughter is brutally raped and murdered.  The killer is found right away.  At this point, the doctor suddenly becomes a master criminal.  He easily abducts the killer from the police after renting an isolated cabin and setting up a very elaborate and terrifying torture room.  The doctor’s criminal genius in stealing a prisoner from police custody and finding an isolated place where he could torture a man and no one would know since his daughter’s birthday would have been in a week, he decides to torture the killer for seven day, kill him and then turn himself.  Meanwhile the police hunt for him and his wife worries.  But other than that, this film is all torture.  The first moment of horrific violence is sudden and powerful, as the doctor smashes the killer’s leg.

The doctor never utters a single word to his daughter’s killer. When he performs surgery on him, he holds up a piece of paper that explains what the drug he will be injecting the killer with would do -- paralyze him then keep him conscious for the brutal surgery that takes place.  That is the closest he comes to speaking to the prisoner.  The doctor/torturer drinks a lot of beer and broods a lot, and is not a likeable character.  He is almost inhuman, and he doesn’t even speak a word when the killer confesses to the murder and described how he enjoyed raping a twelve year old and that she was asking for it.  He beats the shit out of the killer, but doesn’t speak a word.

At some point, he crosses the line and becomes as sadistic as his daughter’s killer.  When he performs the surgery on his captive, he does something so disgusting that it reminded me of "Human Centipede."  MASSIVE SPOLIER ALERT (don’t read this if you want to learn for yourself about the procedure): he rearranges the man’s colon so that it is sticking out of his stomach.  When he has to shit, it blasts out the side of the captive’s stomach.  SPOILER OVER.  This is a sick sadistic thing to do and it is clear the doctor is out of his mind.

Then something happens that pushes him over the line and makes him an evil character.  We can no longer sympathize with him, even though his daughter was the victim of a terrible act.  The killer confesses to the rape and murder of three other girls.  The doctor calls the police and gives them the names of the children.  One woman, a parent of a raped and murdered child, states on TV that the killer was "dead to her."  This infuriates the doctor so he kidnaps her and shoves her face into the mutilated, beaten, tortured body of the killer.  She starts crying and states that seeing the killer like that was like experiencing her daughter’s death a second time.  And then we know that the doctor has become as wicked as the killer, by putting the woman through so much emotional pain by more or less doing to her what the killer did to her.  One might actually feel sorry for the killer because the torture is so intense.  This is not an easy thing to do, get the audience to feel sympathy for a rapist and killer.  But you can just feel his agony.

The effects are well done and this is why the killer becomes worthy of sympathy -- we can experience what he does and it is extremely painful and unpleasant.  I kept wishing he would just die so the torture would end.  At one point the doctor chokes the killer and you can literally see his face turn blue.  He is naked throughout the movie and chained up.  That is dedication to the film that is admirable.

The moral of the story is the philosophical statement that he who fights monsters should be wary he himself does not become one; and about Nietzsche’s statement of looking too deeply into the abyss.  Perhaps the film was arguing against capital punishment or war atrocities, saying that we are just as bad as the people we execute.  The doctor is a torture killer who abducts a woman whose child had been brutally killed just to make a point to her.  The prisoner killed out of compulsive lust.  Both men are evil, but the doctor, unlike his prisoner, starts out as a harmless boring man, and quickly transforms into a man capable of committing brutal, inhumane acts.

When the daughter is killed at the beginning, the parents are having sex.  In the film "Antichrist," the young son falls to his death while his parents are having sex.  I don’t know if this is some type of statement or just the basis for the conflicted nature of the parents.  Is it wrong for a married couple to have sex?  These films seem to say that it is.  It appears to be a crazy moral belief.

This film is part of the French Extremity movement that includes such films as "Man Bites Dog," "Irreversible," "Baise-Moi,"  "I Stand Alone," "Martyrs," and "Inside."  "Martyrs" may be the most brutal film ever made.

I found this to be a most interesting film in that the lead character starts out as a victim and ends up a victimizer, a theme in such revenge films as "I Spit On Your Grave" and "The Hills Have Eye" (both remade recently).  It was tough watching "7 Days," and I recommend it for the experience of seeing a very brutal and powerful torture movie that is unconventional and tries to make the audience think instead of just exposing them to scene after scene of brutality (not that I have a problem with senseless brutality!)

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 Reason for 5 out of 5 rating:
 - Incredibly realistic bone-shattering brutal violence
 - A torture themed film not exactly like every other torture film being made these days and all the cheap SAW rip-offs
 - Even months after viewing the film, I still think about the film, some of the more disturbing images in the film, and the moral questions raised in the film
 - I do love gratuitous torture, but in this film the torture was also crucial to the plot, which is about when men become monsters and their deeds become monstrous
 - Amazing acting
 - A disgusting medical procedure
 - Two creepy main characters