! gnikathtaerb

Rating: 9/10 (9 December 2002)

This stunning film confirms there's still life yet in the thriller genre. Summarise it in terms of its most conventional elements: a serial killer, a quest for justice, a bent cop and a convoluted plot and it might sound like a thousand other hackneyed films marked only by their stunning unoriginality. Watch it, however, and it takes your breath away.
Nolan's triumph in this film is the perfect marriage of form and content. How you you make an original, engaging thriller? A conventional approach is to confuse the viewer, cut the story up into lots of separate threads that are only re-united in the ending. Yawn yawn yawn! But this is a film about a man with memory loss. Each moment is new to him, because he never knows what happened before. So Nolan tells his story in reverse, capturing his character's utter placelessness and simultaneous assembling a plot that is complex, baffling, yet original and natural at the same time, its structure just the consequence of its hero's plight.
This is audacious, but Nolan pulls it off. With a dry wit, moments of poignancy, plenty of action and some interesting questions that lurk below the surface, he never underestimates the viewer's intelligence, in a tale as real as it is bizarre. Definitely a film to be seen more than once!