Memento: The Backwards Thriller That Everyone Copied

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Memento arrived in 2000 as the second feature of a director almost nobody had heard of, and it did something that sounds like a gimmick until you sit inside it: it told a revenge thriller backwards. Not with a few flashbacks. The whole colour narrative runs in reverse, scene by scene, each sequence ending where the previous one began, so that the audience is dropped into every new moment knowing exactly as much as the protagonist knows, which is to say nothing. Twenty-five years and a hundred imitators later, the structure still works, and the reason it works is worth taking apart carefully, because most of the films that borrowed the trick misunderstood what the trick was for.

Nonlinear Narrative - vo.rs

Memento: The Backwards Thriller That Everyone Copied