‘One of the greatest thrillers of all time’ is streaming for free right now

A 00s Christopher Nolan film, often lauded as one of the greatest thrillers of all time, is now streaming for free on Channel Four.

Memento – starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Joe Pantoliano – is famed for its non-linear narrative, with black-and-white scenes played chronologically, and those in colour shown backwards.

It follows Leonard Shelby (Pearce), a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia that results in short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories.

In a bid to find out who killed his wife and caused him to develop this debilitating condition, he used a series of photographs, handwritten notes, and tattoos to gather clues.

Memento premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2000 and was immediately praised by critics, going on to rake in $40 million (£29.9m) over its $9m (£6.7m) during its theatrical run.

It received two Academy Award nominations and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Memento holds an impressive 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critics’ consensus reading: ‘Christopher Nolan skillfully guides the audience through Memento’s fractured narrative, seeping his film in existential dread.’

In their review, Filmspotting said: ‘Think of all the ways that a linear film structure stabilizes us – the cause and effect chain of events. But Memento is about a character completely destabilized, so Nolan destabilizes us accordingly in a way maybe no other movie has.’

The Wall Street Journal wrote: ‘I can’t remember when a movie has seemed so clever, strangely affecting and slyly funny at the very same time.’

New York Daily News praised: ‘Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s second film is one of the most original and ultimately confounding mind games to reach the screen since The Usual Suspects.’

AV Club commented: ‘The astonishing payoff takes the film to another level entirely, unleashing a battery of existential questions that shed new light on everything that precedes it.’

Meanwhile, Entertainment Weekly wrote: ‘Memento is one of those jigsaw puzzles whose pieces snap together more tightly with each viewing. Fueling it all is a performance by Guy Pearce that’s as indelible as the tattoo ink covering his body.’

Speaking to Indiewire in 2014, Nolan reflected on his second-ever feature film and whether he ever worried that the unlikely narrative structure wouldn’t work.

‘There’s this weird irony, because you actually find yourself as a filmmaker in the position of the protagonist that has to trust these notes he’s written himself. It sounds a bit trite, but it’s really true.

‘I watch the screen and think, okay, I read the script three years ago, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But it’s like you really are, at a certain point, you’re so immersed in the material. You’re just having to trust yourself.’

He continued: ‘You have so many points along the way where the film stops being real and you just have to say: this is what I’m making, this is what I’m doing and switch that half of your brain off and absolutely trust your initial instincts, your editor, your actor’s instincts and your own instincts about whether you’re getting what you want.

‘The weird thing is you go through these torturous creative machinations and then you look back at the original script and it’s pretty, pretty close to what’s on the screen. It’s almost exactly the same. You say, “Thank God, how did that wind up like that?”

Memento is streaming now on Channel Four

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