7 Keys: To Be Drifting In The Underbelly
By Heesun Park
I remember living out of a suitcase as a student in New York City. Unable to afford my university’s lower-cost dorm buildings, I jumped from neighborhood to neighborhood: Bushwick, Crown Heights, Carroll Gardens, and finally, the East Village.
It took me a while to shake off the disconnect and resentment from those years of instability. They were all homes that could never last, but it’s still strange to think I can never return. I remember all the streets, all the buildings, and still, I can never go back.
7 Keys is a thriller drama about a man and woman who do manage to make that return. Multiple times over.
Living beneath London’s glamor and struggling to anchor themselves in the capital, a chance meeting sends Daniel and Lena on a weekend spent breaking into all of Daniel’s past homes, as he still carries all the keys. They have lots of sex, bare their souls to each other, and when Daniel’s dark secrets come to light, their romantic fantasy quickly turns violent.
The film sets off forebodingly. An unsettling drone score finds Lena in her unkempt and gray apartment and, when she goes out for the night, electronic music reminiscent of John Wick club scenes plays in the background. Our main characters, stood up on their respective dates, couple up in a red and yellow-tinted manic haze. The stakes are immediately high. Lena throws away her responsibilities to spend an erotic weekend with Daniel. But the intense atmosphere feels mismatched with the subdued line readings and stagnant characterizations. Lena acts as Daniel’s manic pixie dream girl (“Have you ever had any fun, Daniel?” “No, not much.” “It’s a good job you met me then.”) and while there is an opportunity for the story to turn the trope on its head, it unfortunately never does. What the story does succeed in, however, is give way to themes of social inequality and wealth disparity.
Things begin to shift and take shape at the midpoint. Daniel’s violent personality emerges and the film, striking a thin balance between romance and violence against a synth-pop soundtrack, calls upon the unforgettable atmosphere of Refn’s Drive. But 7 Keys chooses to depart from this tone in favor of becoming a typical thriller, a choice that causes some of the most emotionally transformative of moments to feel anticlimactic.
Despite the flat execution of 7 Keys, the foundation of its story goes deep. Its potential to excavate something real feels tangible, and there are some incredibly well done visual moments that linger. I’m still thinking about how London looked in every scene, about how the camera followed Daniel’s body as he leaned over the apartment balcony ledge and floated above him to reveal the cityscape below. About the colors each chapter of the film was dyed in and about Lena asking Daniel to make a home with her. And these have to mean something.