Memento echoes through the Nolanverse 22 years on (2024)

The first moments of Memento see an assassination played in reverse, as a bullet – bloodied and scorched – propels itself out of a man's skull and back into its chamber.

It was the simplest way for director Christopher Nolan to acclimatise his audience to the inside of his protagonist's head. Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), following a brutal attack, has developed anterograde amnesia, meaning he can no longer form new memories. Every 15 minutes or so, the slate is wiped clean.

In 2020's Tenet, the reversing bullet is our introduction to the film's grand conceit, as laid out by a patient and willing scientist (Clémence Poésy) – somewhere, somehow it's become possible to reverse time. A bullet can return to its home as quickly as it's been fired.

"I had this image of a bullet getting sucked out of the wall and into the barrel of a gun," Nolan told Complex, when offering the source of his inspiration for Tenet.

"It's an image that I had in Memento to demonstrate the structure of that movie, but I always harboured this ambition to make a film where the characters had to deal with the physical reality of that."

Watch Memento on Prime Video

From a distance, Nolan reads as a filmmaker moulded by pure ambition – eager to tackle the realms of time, space, and reality with as much spectacle as his budget can afford. A reversing bullet, then, is another rabbit pulled out of a hat, a clever trick from one of Hollywood's foremost illusionists.

And Memento was just the first taste of what he would one day achieve. His debut, Following, may have also boasted a cleverly constructed, non-linear narrative, but it never accumulated the same awe and adoration as its successor.

Memento blossomed on the film festival circuit, then became an unexpected hit at the US box office – after several studios turned it down, presuming that it was simply too complex to be popular. It was eventually nominated for two Academy Awards.

But to revisit the film 22 years after its release is to discover a whole new layer to Nolan's identity – that of a highly evolved filmmaker who took no time to settle on the fixations that would shape the rest of his career.

Memento is concerned with exactly the same things as The Prestige, Inception and Tenet: namely, the intersection between time and memory, and our own futile efforts to control that space.

Leonard is dedicated to avenging his wife (Jorja Fox), who was murdered in the same attack that robbed him of his short-term memory, but can only do so by taking copious notes – there are Polaroids of allies and suspects stuffed in his pockets, tattooed reminders of his mission sprawled across (almost) every inch of his skin.

Leonard chases clue after clue, in a linear progression that Nolan shuffles like a pack of cards so that it better matches his protagonist's own muddled perception of time. Memento cuts between two parallel narratives: the scenes in colour have been placed in reverse order, while the scenes in black and white are arranged chronologically.

The former traces Leonard's steps back from the film's opening kill; the latter sees him on the phone, recounting the story of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a former client from his days as a claims investigator.

This man, Sammy, seemed to suffer from the same affliction – he could never remember what happened moments before, though Leonard ruled that it was psychological state, not a physical one. That wasn't to say Sammy was faking the whole thing, though his wife seemed to take it that way.

As a final, desperate test, she asks for her insulin shot. Then again. And a few more times after that. Silently, she slips into an irreversible coma.

The two timelines join up in the film's final moments, as colour invades a colourless shot – an elegant, seamless shift crafted by editor Dody Dorn. It creates the sense that Memento resides within an endless loop, in the same way that Tenet requires its characters to constantly turn back in time and retrace their steps, as only the gift of their hindsight can ensure their plan goes off without a hitch.

Similarly, Dunkirk uses three parallel timelines – set over the course of a week, a day, and finally an hour – that converge at a crucial moment.

Each contributes to the story of how Allied soldiers were rescued from France's shores in the summer of 1940, after they were cut off and surrounded by German soldiers. It's a subtle reminder that history exists primarily in the collective memory, not in individual tales of heroism.

Time, for Nolan, certainly does not exist in a straight line. It bends in all manner of strange directions.

Consider the ending of Interstellar, when it's revealed that the ghost who'd move around objects in Murphy's bedroom when she was a child was actually her father (Matthew McConaughey), communicating from a space in which time itself has become a physical dimension. Here, he is free to travel wherever he likes, creating intricate loops of the past, present, and future.

The tragedy is that we, cocooned in our own lives, can only ever experience the past through memory. And, as Leonard warns: "Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the colour of a car... they're just an interpretation, they're not a record."

Just as the characters in Inception rely on totems – physical objects with unique properties – to tell them whether they're dreaming or awake, Leonard finds himself clinging to his Polaroids and scribbled notes.

Nolan's films have a reverence for the material world, because it represents our best connection to objective reality. And yet he allows us to question that sense of certainty, too.

Inception ends with the famous, ever-spinning totem – if it falls, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has safely returned from the dream world and to his normal life. If it doesn't, he's trapped somewhere in his mind. But the camera cuts away at the most crucial moment. The answer, it seems, is no longer important to him.

At the end of Memento, Leonard is told – perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the 10th time – that his wife survived the attack. Sammy's story, about the insulin, is actually his own. He sits in his car, takes out a Polaroid of the man who told him the truth, and scribbles "DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES" on the back.

It's the same man he kills in the opening scene – not because he's guilty, but because, without him, he can continue to dwell in the self-made fantasy of a perpetual revenge mission.

The Prestige's duelling magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), bend the world to their own will in order to perform a seemingly impossible trick – 'The Transported Man', a teleportation illusion.

Their obsession is really a desire for control over reality; just as Leonard, on some subconscious level, believes he can forever stave off the guilt of causing his wife's death by living a lie.

He might not be happy, but his pain is of his own making. To Nolan, that's a perverse kind of victory.

Memento is available to buy or rent from Prime Video, iTunes and other digital retailers.