8MM

The most useful thing about Joel Schumacher’s film is its distance from its script. Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven, stepped away over the changes and has never watched it; he told The Guardian in 1999 that the experience was so inherently depressing that the least he could do was spare himself the misery of watching it. Three of the changes are concrete. In Walker’s draft the masked killer’s face is never seen and he never speaks; the film unmasks him and lets him explain himself. The letter from the dead girl’s mother that closes the picture is not in the script, which Walker reads as letting the audience off. Her diary voice over was rewritten too, which he says coarsened her and cost her sympathy. Schumacher had also cut scenes smaller and reordered them so nobody would get bored, which Walker thinks stopped the misery and suspense carrying. Shooting began in Miami in February 1998; the film then competed for the Golden Bear at the 49th Berlin festival, which The Thin Red Line won. A good fit if you care less about the solution than about what the looking does to Tom Welles. Not for you if you would rather not see trade in images of sexual violence handled at this weight.