Private Investigator Tom Welles is hired by a rich widow to discover if a snuff film she found in her late husband's belongings is real. In his search, Welles is forced to go deep into the disturbing--and dangerous--world of underground pornography.
Also known as: 8 Millimeter(working title), Eight Millimeter(working title), Sexy World (working title)
Subgenres: sex, murder
Director: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix
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This film has dirty style to spare--and I wish it had spared some of its style in exchange for some more characterization. Nicolas Cage seems off, somehow, in 8mm; despite him being on screen almost constantly, his character is hollow. The pornography at the heart of the movie seems to be presented merely as a naughty display and not as an integral part of the plot; a problem writer Andrew Kevin Walker did not have with his fantastic Se7en. (Sep 9, 1999) philjohn.com - approaching the unexplained 
8mm is quite a dark and depressing voyage into the darkness of the human soul and psyche, leading us to dark places we usually do not see, confronting us with dark and disturbing pictures, darker than we would probably have suspected. But it much more gives us a notion, an idea of what is happening than portraying it in greatest depth; thereby, while making sure the viewer gets the message, not necessarily being as graphic as it could be. There still is a great level of violence shown, but the real horror created by this movie is much more subtler, much more thus frightening. As with the X-Files episode "Grotesque," the darkness from without is turning within - influencing private investigator Welles (Nicolas Cage) and trying to get hold of him, thereby giving the story another turn of the screw, drawing him deeper into the labyrinth of evil, not allowing him to leave so soon. The visual aspect of the movie is sometimes manifesting as truly extraordinary, but sometimes as quite cliché-like, making use of a lot of rain and darkness. These much too obvious elements make it lose something in the general score. But it is way better than Se7en, with which it has been compared awfully often. But in contrast to that other movie, 8mm has a message to come with the pictures, it also is more frightening by showing less. And it also is portraying the ordinary evil, which doesn't come with any psychological traumas or anything like that. "I do the things I do because I want to do them" - no wonder Welles gets lost, no wonder this is a very depressing piece of fiction. 8mm leads the viewer into a strange world, a strange world which exists on this planet, in this our world, or perhaps better below it. It is a hidden world, hidden because it wants to hide itself and hidden because we'd usually choose to ignore it, to ignore it because we have no answers to the questions it is asking. We like to hide those things, those questionable things, which reveal truths about the human nature which are not just hard but even for most of us impossible to accept. What we perceive is what we believe - is what influences us, is what determines our nature. We cannot so easily lose the pictures which enter our mind because, most of all, thes pictures already are in our mind. The evil surrounding us is no strange matter, no foreign force - it is within us, and we have to fight it, fight it with our morality. But sometimes, we might lose that fight. (Oct 20, 1999)
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