The Final Cut (2004 Film) - Plot

Plot

The film opens with Alan Hakman (Williams) as a child, and another child named Louis Hunt, as they enter an abandoned factory. They come to a long wooden plank suspended very high above the floor, and Louis falls after Hakman goads him into crossing the plank. Hakman flees and is not caught. The film advances to Hakman's adult life, portraying him creating two rememories from Zoe implants. It turns out that Hakman is a very skillful cutter whose edits can make "saints out of criminals", and his services are highly valued by rich, immoral people; Hakman sees himself doing a good deed, as a sin-eater who removes past crimes from the dead so they can rest in peace. At the screening of a rememory, a former cutter, Fletcher (Caviezel), offers Hakman $500,000 for the footage he recently acquired of Charles Bannister, a former EYE Tech manager; the footage, which reveals that Bannister was sexually abusing his young daughter, would discredit the entire "cutting" industry. Hakman refuses to surrender it after locating in the footage a person he believes to be Hunt, whom he'd presumed dead from the fall as a child; he sets the "Guillotine", which in the film is the computer used to sort and edit ("cut") the Zoe footage, to search for more images of the man.

Hakman and his colleagues break into the EYE Tech headquarters to locate Hunt's Zoe footage as a second source, and although he does not find Hunt's footage, because his surname also begins with the letter 'H' he discovers a file under his own name. He realizes that he himself has a Zoe implant, violating the cutter's code that no cutter may have one. He did not know he had an implant because both of his parents had died suddenly before telling him.

In his distress after the discovery that he is implanted, Hakman brings his lover Delila (Sorvino) into his apartment, and leaves her alone with his Guillotine. He immediately undergoes the first stage of a specialized tattooing procedure to end the implant's ability to record audio, he has to wait a week later to get a second tattoo that will remove video. When he returns he puts bullets in his firearm under the belief that Fletcher and his associate have broken into his apartment to steal the Bannister footage. Instead, he finds Delila poring over the full Zoe footage of her late boyfriend. Hakman apparently has kept the footage and has vicariously used it to fill in what's lacking in his life, experiencing their relationship in all its passion and perhaps turning it into the basis for all the feelings he has for her. Delila becomes angry that her private memory with her boyfriend is used in such a manner, and shoots the Guillotine. The bullet hits the Bannister card, destroying its footage.

When Fletcher and his associate finally break in to steal the Bannister footage, they find out it has been destroyed. Hakman lies to Bannister's wife, telling her that a technical fault destroyed it. Hakman then "cuts" into his own memories, and sees that Hunt did not in fact die when he fell, absolving him of decades of guilt. Hakman visits Hunt's grave, and is joined by Fletcher, who has discovered through the tattoo parlour that Hakman has an implant and that it recorded the critical images from the Bannister footage. Foregoing the biopsy procedure, Fletcher chases Hakman through the graveyard filled with video tombstones, eventually catching up to Hakman but hesitant to shoot him. Fletcher's associate, having concealed his presence during the chase between Hakman and Fletcher, then shoots Hakman, killing him.

In the last shot of the movie, Alan Hakman looks at himself in a mirror through his own eyes. But when he looks away and walks off, the camera keeps watching the empty mirror instead of watching what he sees.