Made me feel... almost, uneasy as I watched it

Rating: 9/10 (29 October 2005)

I have put *slight spoiler ahead* at a point, its not so much I have given a plot away, just said something that might get missed when watched.
This film is one of the few, if not the only one, to make me feel... almost, uneasy as I watched it, the way you are made to see, almost feel, everything thru the eyes of the main character (Leonard Shelby), and just how vulnerable you would be if in the same situation. I think it is unsurpassed in at least the last decade of movie making that I have seen (I don't watch a great many movies so I could be wrong here) if not longer.
I saw it on a satellite channel that shows the same film a few times over the course of a single evening and after watching it for the first time I started looking up the times for when it was going to start again, and half an hour later I was back feeling the same things all over again. Now I'm not a person who finds it easy to watch something over and over again (and almost never in the same night), but TBH I feel this film needs it, almost deserved it.
Throughout I kept thinking to myself what would it be like to be in that state of mind (short term memory loss, or more like, a total lack of), not knowing if you can trust what little you have remembered, or managed to pieced together every 10 minutes might be a better way of putting it, to make your way thru the day, with having the weight of all what this man has on his plate, wondering to himself if this could have been the person....
At one point *slight spoiler ahead* another of the other characters waits just out of sight for a short amount of time, after something had happened (that had been forced, just so as to allow the slate to be wiped clean, so to speak), causing the person to think that something 'totally' different had gone on and just by hiding all of the pens and pencils to hand can reinforce what they want to be the truth as seen in the head of the Leonard Shelby character, a very vulnerable and unlucky man ? ... or is he just a nut-case without a grip ?, there is room for an air of doubt to be left in my mind about how much of the underlying stories are about what people.
Even now as I think back I want to watch it over again because it could make some things clearer in my mind, or not, its not a feeling that I did not get it, its more a case of did I put things back together in the right order. Its not an overtly complex, just for the sake of obfuscation and no real ending or story type of film, it is quite complex the way things are seen and played back from the characters points of view.
Not a film to watch while talking with others.