Memento immerses you in an experience that movies rarely provide.

Rating: 9/10 (13 June 2011)

Leonard's mission to find the man who murdered his wife faces a big handicap. With his total loss of short term memory, he can't hang on to the clues he finds.
The movie shows us Leonard's story from end to beginning so it's easy to get caught up in the strange loops of the narrative. This technique is not just a gimmick. The inverted sequence drives the story in ways that make events flow in a way we can follow, but also hits us with sudden ambushes. Memento puts us inside the mind of a man whose mind can't work right. The experience is strange and disorienting, rare and uncomfortable.
The best illustration of this occurs some way through the movie. We are abruptly cut to a junk yard, and we hear Leonard thinking to himself "Am I chasing him? Or is he chasing me?" And at this point, we don't know. Despite everything we've seen and heard, and figured out so far, we have NO idea. There is simply no way to make it fit in. And no time to sort it out. We are very much in Leonard's skin.
Even if told in a normal sequence, Memento has layers beyond the story line. Beyond the story line about Leonard's mission, we see how life delivers rough justice: What happens to Leonard is rough justice for what he did to someone who suffers from the same memory loss. The stranger we see Leonard murder at the beginning of the movie is receiving severe judgment for his crimes. Also, everyone who interacts with Leonard takes advantage as soon as they discover his shortcoming. A pretty dark take on human nature.
"in medias res" starting the story in the middle is an effective way to tell a story. Memento may begin at the end, but it constantly keeps us in the middle of things. The rare experience it provides is good reason to see it. It's also the reason it's not a big commercial success. Watching Memento again, you can't re-experience what you experience seeing it the first time, and you may find the initial experience so disconcerting you don't recognize that that's the payoff. I'm glad I rented it. It gave me a rare, disturbing experience that I couldn't recapture.