MOVIE REVIEWS 8mm (1998)

• Directed by Joel Schumacher
• complete credits: see IMDb entry

• Review

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Dark, Edgy and Intelligent

Rating: 10 of 10        

'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 subtle idea of what is happening, than portraying it in greatest depth; thereby, while making sure the viewer gets the message, it isn't necessarily 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 subtler, much more frightening.

"You do not change the devil - the devil changes you"

As with the X-Files episode 'Grotesque' (see also: Dark Matters, pt. 4), the darkness from without is turning within - influencing private investigator Welles (Nicholas 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. It portrays the ordinary evil, which doesn't come with any psychological traumata 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 asked. 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 (see also The Fabric of Reality Revisited, pt. 1). We cannot so easily lose the pictures which enter our mind because, most of all, these 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.

April 8th, 1998 / August 15th, 2002