Mary, an orphaned teenage girl living in a Catholic boarding school, is informed that her sister Jacqueline stopped paying her fee and does not answer any letters. In order to find her, Mary starts investigating: she finds out that Jacqueline gave her business, a cosmetics company, to a certain Mrs. Redi, and that Jacqueline rented an apartment with a noose above a chair. August, a private detective, is killed when he enters a room suspecting it to accommodate Jacqueline. She also meets Jason, a failed poet. When Mary finds Jacqueline, it turns out that the latter entered a Satanist cult and now wants to escape from it. The cult want Jacqueline to drink a potion and die, but she refuses and walks away. In her apartment block, Jacqueline meets her neighbor, a terminally ill woman. Jacqueline then commits suicide in her apartment with her noose.
A dark film noir that somewhat traverses into horror near the end, "The Seventh Victim" is a disturbing and unsettling existentialist story about depression without any perspective, a one that builds its mood and suspense without showing any violence, instead only relying on implied threat and a distorted psychology of the characters. However, due to its "forbidden" story about a Satanist cult (possibly an allegory on the irrationality of people following dangerous ideologies, such as Fascism during World War II, when the film was made), a lot of the storyline was semi-censored or "softened", resulting in a somewhat chaotic narrative and a lack of a resolution near the anti-climatic end. This is especially noticeable in the character of the main heroine, Mary (great Kim Hunter), who just "vanishes" in the finale. Two good sequences: a private detective, August, exits a room and dies because he was slashed, so Mary runs away and just aimlessly rides in a train, only for two men to enter at a station and carry a third man, and Mary recognizes it is dead August when his hat falls off; Mary is in the shower, and talks to the dark silhouette of Mrs. Redi who entered the bathroom and is on the other side of the curtain. More of such good moments would have helped the film, since it lacks highlights, whereas it suffers from "empty walk" here and there. A few plot holes also bother (the cult wants Jacqueline to drink a poison and die, then just let her walk away - but send a man to kill her, anyway? Why did they let her go, then?), though the movie works as a prototype of future disturbing psychological horrors that stem not from monsters, but from monstrous personalities of people.
Grade:++
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