When thinking of Christopher Nolan, most minds immediately jump to his Dark Knight Batman trilogy or original genre spectacles like Inception, Oppenheimer, or Interstellar. You might even think of his upcoming epic The Odyssey, for which he’s already received quite a bit of backlash. The director has a long list of major hits, many of them revered for their ingenuity in terms of nonlinear storytelling and practical effects. But the clearest expression of everything that makes Nolan fascinating is distilled in one of his most restrained movies.
That movie is Memento and you need to catch this masterpiece before it leaves HBO Max on May 31.
Nolan’s 2000 neo-noir crime thriller is a time-twisted jumble of puzzle pieces that follows the anterograde-amnesic Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) as he attempts to uncover the events surrounding the brutal death of his wife. His condition means he can’t form new memories for more than a few minutes, forcing him to cover himself with seemingly nonsensical tattoos and use a Polaroid camera to track his progress. Shelby’s condition also allows Nolan to frame events in a radically disjointed way, long before he adopted this disjointed framing as a signature of his craft.
Memento presents many of Nolan’s most fascinating themes in their rawest form, introducing viewers to the way he uses fractured timelines, unreliable perception, and emotional repression to evoke protagonists trapped in self-made systems. It’s a blueprint of his entire career, pulling together his best elements into one mind-bending and nail-biting mystery. A perfect example is his use of alternating black-and-white and color sequences to differentiate chronology, mirroring the objective/subjective splits he would later perfect in Oppenheimer and the multi-tiered temporal anxiety of Dunkirk.
Nearly every Nolan film asks viewers to reconstruct reality alongside its protagonist, but Memento is the one film that turns that process into an entire emotional rollercoaster. Shelby slowly descends into mania as obsession and deception take root and viewers soon realize they aren’t just watching a puzzle unfold, but are trapped inside the mind of a narrator who is actively lying to himself. It is the ultimate narrative trick, serving as a spiritual blueprint for The Prestige (another underrated Nolan movie) by proving that the director’s most dangerous characters are always the ones willing to sacrifice their own humanity for the sake of a perfect illusion.
Later films eventually evolved into larger-than-life spectacles, but Memento still feels like one of his most grounded, personal films to date. It’s ugly and human, sporting a grimy noir atmosphere well before Batman Begins. However, there are no heroic characters here. Memento completely lacks the staggering scale of Nolan’s modern epics, but it still conjures some of his most evocative imagery by forcing audiences directly into Shelby’s disoriented mind.
Ultimately, Memento is a reminder of what Nolan can do when stripped of massive budgets and computer-generated effects. It is pure, unfiltered filmmaking that relies entirely on the mechanics of a brilliant script — based on Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori” — and the vulnerabilities of the human mind. Before Nolan trades gritty noir for the epic mythology of The Odyssey, do yourself a favor and stream this foundational treasure on HBO Max before May 31. It’s a puzzle you won’t mind getting lost in, even if the pieces never quite fit the way you expect.
