Nicolas Cage wears an unidentified watch

Andrew Kevin Walker wrote Se7en and then wrote this. 8MM (1999) shares DNA with his earlier screenplay (a man descends into human darkness to answer a question nobody should ask), but Joel Schumacher directs with less restraint than Fincher did, and the result is messier and more divisive. Cage plays Tom Welles, a private investigator hired by a dead man's widow to determine whether a film found in his safe is real. The cast around him is absurd for a late-nineties thriller: Joaquin Phoenix as a punk-rock porn shop clerk named Max California, James Gandolfini as a producer, Peter Stormare as a director, and Norman Reedus before anyone knew who he was.

Cage wears a dark-dialed watch on his left wrist, barely visible under a leather jacket in the film's intentionally murky lighting. It looks like a standard men's tool watch, the kind of thing a small-town PI would own without thinking about it. The brand has not been identified. Welles is a quiet, methodical character at the start, and the watch matches that: functional, unremarkable, a man who does his job and goes home. The film's point is what happens when that man cannot go home anymore.