So the question is not “to be or not to be,” because you aren’t. The question is whether you want to do something about it. Whether revenge matters to you.
—from “Memento Mori” by Jonathan Nolan
If Christopher Nolan’s debut Following (1998) is the blueprint to his filmography, laying out all his thematic concerns and technical flourishes (albeit in primitive form) from the jump, then its follow-up Memento (2000) might very well be the culmination, as all those elements seem to find their ideal narrative manifestation in the nigh-experimental crime drama about a man with a traumatic brain injury who cannot form new memories.
It also remains Nolan’s best film, and while more recent generations have become enamored with the likes of his Batman Trilogy and sci-fi epic Interstellar, it is Memento that will stand the test of time; if simply by virtue of its status as a film school mainstay, if not for its popular standing, fickle as such standings can be.
This is not, I admit, the most controversial claim. One cannot say that Memento is an “underrated” work, though one may be able to say that Nolan’s more popular fare has decidedly overshadowed his earlier accomplishment(s) in the public eye. I’m willing to bet that a not insignificant number of those flocking into 70mm IMAX screenings of The Odyssey have never even heard of, much less seen, his first two features. And of those who have, how many would likewise claim that Memento tops the oeuvre? I’ve only ever met a handful of self-professed Nolan admirers who have done so, despite its stature as an independent film classic.
In any case, twenty-six years after its release, Memento is still quite the formidable feature, in no way dulled by the passage of time and fashion. Protagonist Leonard Shelby is a neo-noir icon: from his twisted, memory-fragmented denouement to that instantly distinctive look, like some bleached-blonde, inked-up street jackal in scuffed designer wear. He prowls the city streets, armed with a Polaroid, seeking whom he may remember. He murmurs of a dead wife in need of vengeance, and a man named Sammy Jankis. Who is Jankis? He’s someone Shelby fucked over in his previous life as an insurance claims investigator, and the only other person Shelby knows of who suffered through the same anomalous trauma.
Shelby uses Jankis as a mental talisman, a case study in what might befall him if he lets his disciplined routine fall off. (This routine involves the use of photographs, tattoos and assorted notes to navigate himself after a memory-lapse.) And he uses what’s left of his wife’s memory to fuel his quest for revenge against the faceless intruder who raped and murdered her and struck Shelby in the back of the head when he attempted to intervene.
The film, famously, is told backwards. There’s that reversed sequence (already we see the DNA of Tenet two decades before that film’s inception) of Shelby shooting a man dead, one of the most intriguingly attention-grabbing openings in recent cinematic history. Then, waking up in a motel room with no idea how he got there, Shelby meets with a man named Teddy, an impishly garrulous middle-aged man who claims to be on friendly terms with him. Through clues he has set up for himself, Shelby suspects that Teddy is the person he has tasked himself to kill. But why? The viewer is, of course, at a loss as to why Teddy deserves such brutal treatment all the way up to when he gets a bullet in the face.
Memento follows that narrative pattern for the rest of its hour-and-fifty-four minute runtime, moving backwards from the opening violence: Shelby recovering from a memory-lapse, and having to figure out on the fly what situation he’d gotten himself into; then the viewer is shown the context for how he ended up in said situation—and so on. Interspersed are black-and-white scenes of Shelby speaking to a mysterious interlocutor over the motel phone, which is where the bulk of the Sammy Jankis narrative is narrated.
The viewer can assume that this conversation is taking place even further back in time, though all these dove-tailing chronologies really do disorient a viewer from locating exactly where they are in the grander scheme. They, like Shelby, must rely on context clues and an absurdly limited POV behind the wheel (Shelby is effectively a stranger to his past selves, who spool out of the originating trauma incomplete, as if images from a busted projector) to stay on track.
It really is a tour de force, and Nolan’s script (adapted from a pretty decent short story written by his brother, Jonathan Nolan) is a masterclass in keeping audience attention whilst openly experimenting with narrative form. The dove-tailing asks a lot from the average viewer, yes, but it never strays far beyond what can be followed on a moment-by-moment basis, and the characters are highly believable in how they behave and react, which is vital to a story that posits a condition as real-world implausible as Shelby’s. Its very real darkness is leavened by moments of humor and wit that would naturally result from people running into a man whose capacity for recall barely beats that of the proverbial goldfish.
Memento was certainly not the first film to play with memory and chronology—the great Dark City, released just two years before Nolan’s flick, immediately comes to mind, as it also features a PI-coded everyman who must reconstitute his own identity in an unfamiliar environment using scattered clues and the testimonies of others—but few ever achieve such a finely wound unity, tying the “end” and “beginning” together in a way that not only satisfies plot-wise but perfectly communicates the protagonist’s entire raison d’etre as a figure caught between methodical action and hollowed-out purpose.
Guy Pearce is consummate in the role, perfectly balancing a wounded psyche with predatorial relentlessness; as well as the Shelby of “now” with Shelby pre-injury, who is by any measure a smarmy scumbag. Joe Pantoliano kills it as Teddy, as he must act as both comedic relief and potential Machiavellian schemer. And there is no noir without a femme fatale, but Carrie-Anne Moss’s Natalie gets to back up her insidiousness with understandable motivations of her own, and her decision-making makes it clear that, in this world, you survive not through a heart of gold but by staying one step ahead.
Leonard Shelby, on one level, is certainly one of the more sympathetic characters in modern storytelling. He is profoundly sick, and it is disquieting when we see him get taken advantage of, as would be the reaction for most sane, well-adjusted folk when the mentally handicapped are mistreated. After all, we would not desire such for ourselves were we ever to suffer the same condition. Much of Memento‘s greatness lies in 1) its gradual revelation of Shelby’s plight and the part he played in his own unraveling, so as to complicate that very relatability; and 2) how genuinely existential his search becomes, taking what might have been just a slick, technically inventive neo-noir into deeper matters, asking questions like “What is a self without the continuity of memory?” and “How solid is the world, and others, when the mind shutters its awareness even momentarily?”
Of course, I’m dressing up those questions for the purposes of this piece; Shelby is no philosopher, and the film’s script excels not through highfalutin pontification but gritty, believable exchanges in a sector of urban life one can find in the seedy corners of cities all over the world. And Shelby, though extraordinarily damaged, is confronted with a dilemma most sane, well-adjusted folk find themselves confronting all the time: Should I, or should I not, move on from my own guilt? Maybe I should, since there is no real existence without doing so. But maybe I shouldn’t—especially if life is so much simpler when I never have to properly face what’s plaguing me in the first place.
Shelby’s final line is one of the all-time closers, as its banal quality masks the deeper query beneath, which is one which he will never allow himself—or the stranger coming after him—to ask. Those parting words close the loop for us, but somewhere in the dusty alleys of anywhere, lean and ill-fitted, Leonard Shelby’s still looking for an ending.
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More from Ezekiel Yu: These Shadowed Angles: Analyzing Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (1949), I Think I Like It In Here: Reviewing Kane Parsons’s “Backrooms” (2026), Why Don’t You Love Me: Reviewing Curry Barker’s “Obsession” (2025)