Guy Pearce plays Leonard, who suffers from a condition where he cannot maintain new memories for more than a few minutes at a time, but who’s nevertheless seeking to find his wife’s killer.
Hollywood’s favourite mental illness, amnesia, gets the thriller treatment in this cleverly told whodunnit. Guy Pearce plays Leonard, who suffers from a condition where he cannot maintain new memories for more than a few minutes at a time, but who’s nevertheless seeking to find his wife’s killer. Nolan’s innovation was to play the story backwards, creating a world where the murderer we think we’re seeking is not the one we find. The resulting neo-noir mixes black-and-white and colour, something of a Nolan theme, and uses tattoos to great story effect to show us a man who can’t move on from the history written on his skin. That twist at the end, or perhaps beginning, remains chilling.