Following: Looking back at Christopher Nolan’s first film
Review Overview
Cast
6Concept
8Climax
7Ivan Radford | On 23, Jul 2023
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw, Lucy Russell, John Nolan
Certificate: 15
“You take it away… to show them what they had.” That’s the motivation offered by Cobb (Alex Haw), a thief who finds himself taking a young man (Jeremy Theobald) under his wing. The young man is unemployed and dreams of being a writer, and he feeds that dream by trying to find inspiration by following people – random strangers, although he soon realises that his habit has the potential of opening up darker obsessions.
One day, his latest followee spots and confronts him. He introduces himself as Cobb and is quick to explain his work to his impressionable follower – positioning himself as someone who enjoys the psychological sport of breaking and entering, rather than a burglar driven by financial gain. Disrupting their lives, upsetting their routines and getting them to think. Those are his tools of the trade, and it’s not hard to think of it as some kind of statement of intent from the fledgling filmmaker Nolan, who would go on to name his lead character in Inception Cobb.
Both the voyeur in front of the camera and behind it (and Inception’s protagonist too) share a joint satisfaction in unearthing the tiny box lurking at the heart of a person’s life – the secret place where their most treasured, personal mementoes are stored. As with Nolan’s later work, we get to that small chamber of reason by weaving through a narrative puzzle box – the director’s penchant for playing with perception (in terms of time, identity and memory) is clear to see here, boiled down to a simple kernel of an idea.
And so, as we follow this unknown man through interwoven timelines, we begin to piece together the varying plots that are unfolding, some unwitting and some intentional. The introduction of a young blonde woman (Lucy Russell) adds an additional layer of suspicion to proceedings and, although there’s a clinical lack of emotion to their affair, there’s a tangible sense of our antihero losing himself in their lives – his clothes and hair both change, along with his attitude and behaviour.
The final pay-off doesn’t take us anywhere as mind-blowing as you might hope, but what’s striking is how quickly Nolan displayed that kind of bold ambition as soon as he was given the trust and resources to do it – this is more Blood Simple than, say, Moon, Donnie Darko or The Ghoul, in that it distils the essence of Nolan’s talent into something that’s made with confidence and little to no money (the budget was around £3,000, less than El Mariachi). The result is an attention-grabbing calling card from a director who, even with his trademark scale stripped away, showed audiences what he had to offer.