Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.
- The ending: Rex finally learns the truth...by waking up with a lighter in a box, to which he can only scream for help that will never come as it sets in just how much his fate has been figuratively and literally sealed. When Se7en was first released, one critic said it featured the most frightening ending of any film since this one. They were bang on the money. This is compounded by Raymond proposing that Rex learn the truth by experiencing it firsthand; Saskia went through the exact same thing.
- The core premise. Your girlfriend goes to the shops - and simply never returns.
- When Fridge Horror sets in.... oh boy. When he's first trying to put his plan in action, Raymond is stymied again and again, either by his own amateurish mistakes, or by simple bad luck. Just before he meets Saskia, he is ready to give it up, but he doesn't appear to regret it. He is laughing to himself, suggesting he's thinking, oh well, he gave it a shot, and he had fun. Fast forward three years, and Raymond is about to do the exact same thing to Rex. Rex looks like he won't go for it at first. Raymond loses his patience, starts to become angry, and presses Rex into going through with their deal, that Rex will find out what happened to Saskia, but only if he's willing to share her fate. The change in attitude is telling. Raymond now has a taste for his new little hobby. He's a budding serial killer. He may be caught eventually, but it will be many years — and many bodies buried — before that happens.
- The scene earlier on in the movie, just after Saskia's disappearance, when Raymond is eating outside with his family. A faint scream is heard in the distance, origin unknown and Raymond makes a fun game of it by getting the whole family to scream themselves. At the end, however, it's shown that Rex is buried right under where Raymond and his family eat outside. In addition to the horror of Raymond's family literally eating on the grave of a dying man, there's also the retroactive revelation that the faint scream heard earlier was very likely Saskia waking up in her own coffin, and Raymond's family was inadvertantly (apart from Raymond) having some fun with her slow, agonizing demise.
- The look on Raymond's eyes when he's looking at a desperate Rex who can't decide whether he is going to drink the first's soporific. This is the first time we see Raymond as the sociopath he really is. And giving that he is a perfectly realistic example, it is all the more terrifying.
