Nicolas Cage plays a surveillance specialist hired by a wealthy widow to determine whether a disturbing snuff film found among her late husband's belongings is genuine, a investigation that pulls him into the brutal underworld of illegal pornography with the help of a streetwise video-store clerk played by Joaquin Phoenix. Director Joel Schumacher stages the descent as a grim moral gauntlet, with Cage's character growing more unhinged the closer he gets to the truth, sacrificing his marriage and sanity along the way. The film courted controversy for its unflinching subject matter on release. A dark, punishing thriller that trades typical Schumacher gloss for genuine bleakness.