One of the best thrillers of all time.

Rating: 10/10 (4 October 2005)

I was one of very few mainstream viewers who saw Memento in the theatres. Later, when it was out on DVD, it became such a sleeper hit, spread by word of mouth, that practically everybody I knew had seen it. The words "short-term memory" loss became a key gimick in film and television. The concept of a movie, flowing out of sequence, generally unused since Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, now came back with a vengeance, forming such films as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Memento truly deserves to be called one of the greatest thrillers ever made. The concept of a man who cannot make new memories trying to locate his wife's murderer is a brilliant, but the impetus used by putting it in reverse is shattering. We experience the world of Leonard Shelby, whose short-term memory was destroyed in the same incident that saw the murder and rape of his wife, as he searches for the murderer, the mysterious John G. Tattooed with key information, Leonard is the centre of a drama involving three people: himself, Natalie, and Teddy. The story begins at the end, with LEonard finding Teddy to in fact be the John G. he has been searching for, and murdering him. Thus, Leonard is the romantic hero out for revenge. But as the story unfolds, new faces are revealed. The notes which he lives his life by, written on the backs of photographs, have their genesis one after the other, characterizing who he trusts and who he doesn't. A mark on Teddy's photo, reading "Do not believe his lies," renders everything Teddy says, in Leonard's mind, false. Thus, for much of the film, we feel close to Leonard, sympathise with him, distrust Teddy, and see Natalie as the kind lover and helper. But as facts are revealed, these things begin to change. Natalie is revealed as a truly sinister character, using Leonard's condition to get rid of her enemies. Teddy's advice begins to sound practical, and true. Yet only in the final scene are we shown Leonard's real face: the bloodthirsty killer whose memory creates a vacuum into which all guilt and responsibility vanish, and who, never being able to fulfill his vengeance, and unable to heal by time, is driven by the soul purpose of destruction, by an enigma he created himself. In the final scene, we are left with a genuine feeling of unease. Why? Because we have attached ourselves to these characters as what they were revealed as at the beginning, we have sympathised with them, and never knowing where they came from, were content to assume by the present. But in the end, we find ourselves close to a psychotic, a murderer, a sociopath whose memory destroys all fulfillment and remorse, in other words, a mad man.