The second it was over, I ran to pee. I’d needed to for about an hour, and had gotten up several times, but couldn’t pull myself away from the movie.
It’s not a movie for everybody. Our protagonist, the Nicholas Cage character, is a private investigator. A wealthy woman whose husband just died hires him because she found a snuff film in his safety deposit box, and she wants him to find out if the girl in the film was really murdered. He assures her there are no real snuff films, but takes the job.
He finds out all he was hired to, and much more than he ever wanted to know.
The screenwriter is the same person who wrote Se7en, although it’s a very different movie. 8mm is a detective story, but a very dark and disturbing one, and doesn’t really belong in the horror film category, although parts of it, are, indeed, horrifying — like at the end of the movie, when the killer says he does what he does because he enjoys it, and says it with a smile on his face. Cage starts out as your everyday liberal sort who believes that people do bad things because they weren’t hugged enough, and finds out different.
It’s amazing that a movie could be so good with Nicholas Cage in every scene. It wasn’t Cage that kept me in the seat glued to the television; it was the movie.
Despite the subject matter, the movie isn’t exploitative. What you do see of the snuff film (and a few others made by the same character) is either repulsive or freeze-frames, and there isn’t much of either. Beautifully written, edited, and filmed, enough that you don’t care that Nicholas Cage is there being Nicholas Cage.
If you like thrillers, you’ll love this. If you’re looking for titillation or horror, keep looking. You’ll find neither here.
