Following Review

Nolan shot this on weekends over a year on black and white sixteen millimetre stock, with friends acting and himself operating the camera, for something close to six thousand dollars. What is remarkable is how completely the finished career is visible in it. A lonely writer starts following strangers for material, meets a burglar who breaks into flats less to steal than to show people who they are, and the film cuts its timeline into three interleaved strands so you understand the trap only when the victim does.

The identity swap, the unreliable narrator, the con revealed as architecture, all of it is here before Memento. The cost is obvious in every frame. The performances are amateur, the sound is thin and boxy, the flat interiors look like flats a student could borrow, and the twist arrives with a tidiness that treats characters as pieces. It is a demonstration more than a story, and it knows it. But sixty nine minutes is exactly the right length for a demonstration this sharp, and the burglary scenes still have a genuine unease.