Christopher Nolan’s first movie is waiting to be rediscovered (and for free)

Looking back, it’s fair to describe Christopher Nolan’s career path as “meteoric.” 2000’s Memento was only his second movie. That was his breakthrough project, which led to Nolan working with Al Pacino (!) and Robin Williams for 2002’s Insomnia. Next came Batman Begins (2005), Nolan’s fourth movie, and that’s what really made Nolan a household name. Much like Steven Soderbergh, Nolan got famous fast.

Most new filmmakers spend more time in the trenches than Nolan did, making commercials, TV, or B-movies. They tend to have an extensive backlog when they hit it big so new fans can revisit their past work. For example, if you watch Everything Everywhere All at Once and you want to see what else Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan have done, you can check out a dozen strange music videos they made before they got anywhere near a major motion picture. If you’re looking for early work from Steven Spielberg, you can watch Duel or Amblin’.

For Christopher Nolan, your only stop before Memento is his debut, 1998’s Following. Before you run out to see Nolan’s The Odyssey, it can be fun to take a look at how he started. It’s currently available via AMC+, or for free on the library streaming network Kanopy.

Following begins with Bill (Jeremy Theobald), an unemployed writer who picks up a strange hobby: pursuing strangers through the streets of London just to see where they’re going. He has no other agenda. He’s curious, that’s all, and he has nothing else to do.

It doesn’t take long before one of those strangers spots Bill. That stranger, Cobb (Alex Haw), turns out to be a professional burglar, who in his own way is as much of a voyeur as Bill. He introduces Bill to the business of robbery, pitching it to him as the natural next step up from Bill’s following habit. Soon, Bill’s hooked, but he gets in over his head just as quickly.

If you didn’t know anything about Following before you started it, it’s easy to mistake it as a much older movie. It’s shot in black-and-white, on 16mm film, and there are only a few background elements — Cobb swears like a sailor and likes to steal CDs, as they’re easy to fence — to let you know that Following is set in what was then modern London.

The only thing that keeps Following from being a pitch-perfect recreation of old ’50s noir movies is that it’s exclusively set during the day, since Nolan couldn’t afford lights. It’s got all the elements of something like a Sunset Boulevard or Angels With Dirty Faces, as Bill keeps digging himself deeper into the strange underworld that Cobb inhabits, but there isn’t a shadow to be seen. (Film noir took its name from the French word for “dark,” so what do you call a noir movie that’s never out of direct sunlight? A lumière?)

That gives Following a more straightforward feel than most of Nolan’s later projects. Nolan has a reputation for surreal stories, but that doesn’t truly kick in until Memento. Following is Nolan at his most comparatively restrained, doing the best he can with whatever he can afford, telling a direct story about a kid who lets boredom lead him into a bad situation. You can tell from frame one of Following that Bill’s story probably won’t end well for him, but you won’t be able to predict just how.

It’s strange that Following doesn’t have more of a reputation in 2026. A working theory is that Memento got so famous so quickly, thanks to its central twist and bizarre construction, that it overshadowed Following. Otherwise, you’d likely hear more talk about Following as one of the last great shoestring-budget indies of the ’90s, alongside Clerks, El Mariachi, and The Blair Witch Project. If you only know Christopher Nolan for his historical epics or surreal action movies, then Following represents a different, less-exposed side of his filmography.

Following is now streaming for free on Kanopy or with an AMC+ membership.