Following

Christopher Nolan's first feature film wowed critics who saw it when it first came out. Shot on a micro budget of $6,000 this is a student film with real class. The film is shot in black and white, and features people who you assume are friends of Nolan's appearing in the movie. This is not to say they are bad actors because they are quite good. You could see Jeremy Theobald and Alex Haw appearing in other projects but unfortunately they haven't since this was made 6 years ago.

Nolan's thriller, much like Memento, does not play chronologically, it shifts the scenes around much like Pulp Fiction. The writing is fantastic. It is a great twisting thriller but because the temporal order of the film is shifted around it makes it even more interesting. I thought the last ten minutes in particular when everything starts to become clear were excellent.

For a film of such a small budget and with no recognizable names at all, this is so good. It is superior to most that Hollywood studios offer and Nolan after three films (this, the superior Memento and the not quite as good but still excellent Insomnia) has cemented himself as the most exciting new talent of recent times. I can't wait for Batman.

This film is short and sweet and certainly a great watch. It is very professional and the twists are fantastic and completely surprising. I also thought that the score from David Julyan was also excellent, very atmospheric and had a chilly quality to it. He has gone on to compose Nolan's other films.

Overall I would recommend this, I intend to get all of Nolan's films. This is a low budget gem. *****

In this intriguing noir thriller (looking like the Forties, but with a psychology befitting the Nineties), Director Christopher Nolan employs a number of techniques he would perfect in his internationally acclaimed Memento (2000), most notably scenes presented out of time sequence for effect, and a naive protagonist taken advantage of by others. The film opens with "Bill, the Innocent" (as I might dub him), played by Jeremy Theobald, trying to explain to someone, perhaps a social worker, perhaps even a police inspector (John Nolan), why he took up following people just for the fun of it. He doesn't just follow women, he points out. He's not a stalker, as such. He's just curious. He's an intriguing and sympathetic character, a Brit writer with a lot of time on his hands who seems something of a throwback to an earlier age with his clanking manual typewriter and the photo of a pursed-lips Marilyn Monroe on the wall of his shabby apartment. Things began to go wrong for him, he further explains, when he broke some of his "following rules" and got too close to his prey. What he doesn't know and what we don't know yet, is that his clumsy following technique has allowed him to unwittingly become the followed himself. Enter a juicy blonde (Lucy Russell) walking down some steps from her apartment. (This scene is out of sequence as far as chronological time goes, but psychologically speaking, her appearance signals his entanglement). Enter now a scheming, sophisticated psychopathic thrill-seeker named Cobb (Alex Haw) who entices Bill with his (apparent) practice of burglary just for the powerful feeling one gets from invading the sanctity of another's life. Although justification for the temporal inversions here is not as clearly established as in Memento, nonetheless the technique works well, and Nolan provides us with a clever ending that sneaks up on us and makes in a few seconds all that went before clear. Or mostly clear. You might want to rewind and view the first few minutes of the film, and then everything should be clarity. This low-budget, black and white, deliciously ironic little film (71 minutes) marked the auspicious debut of a film maker who has already made quite a name for himself, not only with the aforementioned Memento, but with Insomnia (2002). It will be interesting to see what Nolan does next.

After watching Memento one might well wonder how Christopher Nolan pulled off something that audacious, that brilliant, in what was his major directorial debut. Watch Following, the no-budget thriller which was Nolan's actual directorial debut, and you begin to understand. With no money, with an amateur cast and doing pretty much everything (writing, shooting, directing) himself Nolan created a little masterpiece. Whatever "it" is that enables someone to make great movies Nolan clearly has it. And had it right from the beginning.

Fans of Memento will see a lot of similarities, hints of what was to come, in Following. The most obvious parallel is the nonlinear time structure as the story here unfolds completely out of order. Whereas the story in Memento proceeded more or less in a straight line which just happened to be moving backwards here there is no line at all. Scenes are placed in a seemingly random order. We're all over the place. At the end, in the beginning, somewhere in the middle, back to the end again...it really could have been a jumbled mess. But Nolan gives us a little assistance in orienting ourselves with the shifting appearance of his main character. He has three distinct looks to him and once you figure that out you can figure out where you are in the story. But there are still enough twists and turns to make your head spin, to keep you guessing right up to the end.

The less said about the plot the better. Best to let you try to piece the puzzle together for yourself. Much like Memento you really have to see it all the way through to fully appreciate the true genius of it, to understand how any missteps from Nolan along the way could have unraveled his whole story. When the movie concludes you can't help but be amazed that Nolan could pull this off essentially by himself. At least with Memento he had a little help. Here it's just Nolan and his small cast. There are really only three roles of any significance in the film, maybe four if you're being generous. But this little troupe and their first-time director combined to create something really special. The acting may at times seem a bit amateurish but that has to be expected from performers who are certainly not acting pros. And any little quibbles with the performances do not detract at all from the overall movie-watching experience. The actors do more than well enough to get by, well enough in fact that you're surprised there were not bigger acting roles for them somewhere down the line if they wanted them. That the performers have a great story to work with certainly helped their cause.

Things do get a little convoluted in the end as Nolan's story takes its final turns. You worry that things may be getting away from him a little bit. But he manages to ultimately pull it all together. You may have to really think about it after things are through but it all makes sense when you run it back in your mind. And it's nice every now and again to have a movie that actually requires you to think isn't it? Christopher Nolan seems to specialize in movies like that. He just makes great movies. Here he did it with no money, all on his own, never having made a movie before. It takes a special talent to pull that off. And among his many talents Nolan also apparently possesses the ability to see into his own future. When you watch Following note the Batman logo on the main character's apartment door.

Great film. No gratuitous gimmicks like in most Hollywood films. Everything supported the suspense of the plot. B&w gave it a basic, no-frills feel also. In short, it was visceral in its simplicity of cinematography and cast.

Following serves as an interesting contrast to Memento. Characters in both used manipulation and subterfuge extensively. In that sense, both reminded me somewhat of "In the Company of Men," also highly recommendable. One difference between Nolan's two films is that Memento was a little easier for me to follow, given that the b&w scenes progress in a constant chronological direction, and so do those in color. I don't think that was true of Following, where scenes seemed to be shown at random. If you have the choice between VCR and DVD, I'd highly recommend DVD, since that gives you the option of watching the movie a second time in chronological order, not just in the scrambled (albeit ingenuous) order presented by Nolan. It also makes it easier, upon a second viewing, to piece the order together for yourself, if you want to.

As another viewer noted, one of the best things about both this movie and Memento is that none of the cast were famous. They were characters, not big-name actors who brought in personas developed in other movies.

Given certain similarities in the plots, I wonder if Memento is sort of a remake of Following, but intended to reach a bigger audience, like Edward Burns made She's the One in the mold of -- and with largely the same cast as -- The Brothers McMullan.

The debut that plucked from obscurity one of the brighter stars of contemporary noir is an assured, if limited, stab at the con game and obsession. Filmed for zero money, Nolan couldn't have chosen a better subject than the drab and seamy underside of London to ply his trade, given the lack of funds. This short (67 min) is at its best in playing with the audience's and protagonist's expectations about who is scamming whom, though the initial set-up does ring some alarm bells in the credibility dept. The muddy cinematography (he often used natural lighting due to budget) can be mostly chalked up to noir stylization, though the limitations do show at times.

One can easily see Nolan's style developing in this fledgling effort; many of the same themes of blurred identity and expectation smashing recur in MEMENTO and INSOMNIA. Not a masterpiece but good and certainly worth a look for modern noir and Nolan fans.