Memento (2000)
★★★★ — Memento (2000)
Memento arrived in 2000 as something of a left-field proposition: a neo-noir thriller told largely in reverse chronological order, following a man who cannot form new short-term memories as he hunts for the person responsible for his wife's murder. The film was based on a short story by Jonathan Nolan, and adapted for the screen by his brother, the director Christopher Nolan. At the time, Nolan had only one feature to his name, the low-budget British thriller Following (1998), and Memento represented a significant step up in scale and ambition, even if the budgets involved remained modest by Hollywood standards. Released through Newmarket Films and Summit Entertainment, it was the kind of film that found its audience gradually, word of mouth doing much of the heavy lifting in the months after its initial release. The structure of the film, in which the majority of scenes unspool in reverse order while a separate black-and-white thread runs forwards, was the sort of formal conceit that could easily have felt gimmicky. The reason it did not comes down, in no small part, to the seriousness with which Nolan and his collaborators committed to the premise.
For many viewers, Memento was also a formal introduction to Guy Pearce as a genuine leading man. Pearce had made an impression in L.A. Confidential a few years earlier, but here he carries virtually every scene, playing Leonard Shelby with a kind of worn, methodical desperation. It is a physically and emotionally demanding performance: Leonard is a man who must reconstruct his own understanding of the world from scratch every few minutes, relying on photographs, tattooed notes on his own skin, and the goodwill (or otherwise) of those around him. Opposite him, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano bring a slippery, hard-to-read quality to their roles that suits the film's atmosphere of uncertainty perfectly. Pantoliano in particular has a gift for playing characters where charm and menace sit uncomfortably close together, and it serves him well here. The film runs to 113 minutes, a tight and purposeful runtime that never feels padded. It established Nolan as a director worth watching closely, and he would go on to build a substantial body of work in the years that followed, as we have explored in our looks at The Prestige and Inception, both of which share Memento's appetite for structural complexity and questions about the reliability of perception.
I forgot why I liked this movie so I watched it again. Memento is a great film. It's one of those films like Sixth Sense or Seven that you can't really rewatch until you've entirely forgotten the film but on first viewing it's absolutely fantastic. It's almost like a murder mystery or a thriller as you're trying to piece together the story with the main character. It works beautifully as each revelation is revealed to him and us at the same time. A great film to show someone who's never seen it before.
What strikes me coming back to this one is just how rare it is to find a film where the formal trickery and the emotional core reinforce each other so cleanly. The reverse structure is not decoration: it puts you inside Leonard's condition in a way that a straightforward telling simply could not. There is something almost cruel about it, in the best possible sense. It is the kind of film that reminds you what the thriller genre can do when someone genuinely inventive is at the wheel, which makes it a natural companion to something like The 39 Steps, a very different era and style but the same underlying pleasure of being kept just slightly off-balance throughout. Some films are built to be revisited. Memento is built to be experienced once, clean, with someone who has no idea what is coming.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2000 | Watched: 2025-04-08
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Christopher Nolan: Insomnia (2002) · The Prestige (2006) · Inception (2010) · The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
More with Guy Pearce: L.A. Confidential (1997)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More mystery: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · One Way or Another (1975)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
