Following

For those of you who are familiar with director Christopher Nolan (The Prestige, Memento, Batman Begins), you probably have never heard of this film. This is a low budget ($6,000!) film made by Nolan and his friends in England on weekends for a year. Told in a typical Nolan non-linear storyline, the movie is about a young unemployed writer who takes to following strangers to get ideas for a book. However, one of the men he is following notices this, and he entices the young man to join him when he robs an apartment. The man identifies himself as Cobb, and while they are in the apartment, Cobb shows that he isn’t so much concerned with stealing as seeing who a person really is, and destroying their personal items. The young man begins to emulate everything about Cobb (his appearance, mannerisms, etc.), and starts a relationship with a woman whose apartment he once broke into. When the young man finds out that her gangster boyfriend is blackmailing her, he makes a series of bad decisions that bring all the fragments of the story together.

Extremely well acted and edited, it’s difficult to remember that a major company did not produce this. The sequencing of the scenes is reminiscent of Nolan’s next movie, Memento, but more understandable from the start of the movie. There seems to be a growing trend among directors to edit their movies in a non-linear fashion (Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant), which, because I’m nerdy, I think points towards postmodern trends. Nothing can be known for certain until the end of the movie, and even then the content is usually subject to the viewer's impressions. It’s the film neo-noir, where it’s all subject to your own interpretation. You can choose to believe whatever you want.

Since I doubt you’ll be able to find it at Blockbuster, I recommend getting this movie from NetFlix. It’s a short movie, but full of psychological insights that are common to other Nolan movies. Also, support independent movies! It’s through small movies that good directors and actors can be found.