8 / 10
Official trailer
A Lonely Idiot With a Notebook
A young man sits in a bare room and tells a cop how he got into this mess.
He wanted to be a writer. With no ideas, no job and no friends, he started following strangers around London to see where they went. He had rules. Never follow the same person twice. Never get close.
He broke both rules, obviously, or there’d be no film.
I like this guy the way you like a character in a horror movie who goes into the basement. He’s bored, he’s lonely and he’s flattered by the first person who pays attention to him, and you can see every bad decision coming a mile off. He can’t. That gap between what he sees and what you see is the whole engine of the movie, and Nolan runs it hard for seventy minutes.
For Writers
The young man sets himself two rules and breaks both of them. That’s the inciting incident, and it’s the oldest trick in the book because it works. The reader learns who the character is by watching the rule, and learns the story has started by watching it break.
Too many manuscripts open with somebody’s morning routine, and nothing in the routine matters.
Give your character a rule instead, a line they won’t cross, and put it on the page early. Then make the first real scene the moment they cross it. The reader doesn’t need to be told the story has started. They’ll feel the floor tilt. Rules are cheap to write and they do double duty: they tell the reader who your character thinks they are, and the broken rule shows who they really are.
Cobb
The man he follows turns around in a café and asks him, quite pleasantly, why he’s being followed.
That’s Cobb. He’s a burglar, he dresses well, he talks like a philosophy lecturer, and he doesn’t steal your television. He goes through your underwear drawer and your letters and your photographs, and he moves things around so you’ll know somebody was there.
Alex Haw plays him with a smug, easy charm, and he walks away with the movie. Cobb says he breaks in to show people what they had by taking it away. Lovely little speech. Complete bullshit, and the young man swallows it whole because nobody has ever talked to him like he mattered.
Nolan liked the name so much he gave it to Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception. Different thief, same job: getting into somebody’s head and rearranging the furniture.
Six Thousand Dollars
Nolan made this thing for roughly six thousand dollars, and it should embarrass every studio executive who ever blew two hundred million on a sequel nobody asked for.
He shot it on sixteen-millimetre black and white, on weekends, over about a year, because his cast and crew all had day jobs. Real flats. Real streets. Natural light. Rehearse until you can get it in one take, because film stock costs money you don’t have.
You can see the budget in every frame. The sound is rough, the acting is uneven, and some of the lighting looks like somebody opened a curtain and hoped. I don’t care. The limits force every scene to justify itself, and there isn’t a wasted minute in the thing.
The movie made Nolan’s career. Memento came next, then the Batman films, then Inception, and Oppenheimer won him the Oscar. It all starts in a grotty London flat with a borrowed camera.
Three Timelines and a Haircut
Nolan tells the story out of order, jumping between three periods: the early following, the burglaries with Cobb, and a later stretch where the young man has cut his hair, bought a suit and got himself beaten up. You track which is which by the haircut and the bruises. It sounds gimmicky. It works.
Scrambling the order does two things. It turns a small, grubby crime story into a puzzle you’re actively trying to solve, and it lets Nolan hide the one piece of information that would give the game away until the exact moment it hurts most. He’d do the same trick bigger and better in Memento, but here it’s already sharp.
I think the haircut trick is the smartest thing in the film. I never once got lost, and I never once got ahead of it either. Nolan hands me just enough to keep up and not a scrap more.
The ending brings the three strands together, and suddenly half of what you thought you saw means something else. That’s when you realize the film was never about a writer learning to be a burglar.
For Writers
Nolan tracks three timelines with a haircut and a bruised face. That’s all. No title cards, no dates, no clumsy narration telling you where you are. The audience works it out from what they can see.
If you’re telling a story out of order, you owe the reader an anchor. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A limp that comes and goes, a wedding ring that appears, a car that gets dented.
Pick one visible detail for each period and mention it in the first few lines of every scene set there. The reader will thank you by staying lost in the right way, puzzling over the plot, never over the calendar.
The Blonde
Lucy Russell plays the blonde, a cool, wary woman whose flat the young man helps burgle, and who he then starts sleeping with, because of course he does. She tells him a sad story about a man blackmailing her with photographs, and he volunteers to be her hero.
She’s the classic femme fatale, and Russell gives her a tired edge that makes you wonder what she’s really playing at. Her connection to Cobb, when it’s finally revealed, turns every scene she’s in upside down. Russell is the performance I’d single out. She plays every scene as if she’s already bored with the man she’s lying to, and once the truth comes out, that boredom looks a lot like contempt. I wish the film had given her ten more minutes.
The Con
The young man was never Cobb’s apprentice. He was the patsy. Everything, the following, the burglaries, the new haircut, the romance, was set up so that when a crime needed somebody to hang it on, there’d be a pathetic, obsessive stranger with his fingerprints all over it.
It’s cruel, it’s clever, and it’s fair. Watch it a second time and the clues are everywhere, planted in plain sight while you were busy watching the poor sap fall for it. The last shot is Cobb walking off into a London crowd. He could be anybody. He’ll do it again. Cobb doesn’t gloat or explain himself on the way out. He just melts into a crowd, and I found watching him get away with it far nastier than any arrest would have been.
For Writers
The twist works because every clue was already on screen. Nolan didn’t cheat. He just put the evidence where you weren’t looking, because you were busy watching a lonely man make a fool of himself.
A twist that comes out of nowhere feels like a cheap trick, and readers hate cheap tricks. After you write your reveal, go back through the draft with a highlighter and mark every scene that supports it. If there are fewer than three, add them. If any scene contradicts the twist, fix it or cut it. Then hand it to somebody who hasn’t read it and see whether they feel fooled or cheated. Fooled is good.
Cheated means you’ve got more work to do. My article on plot devices that work and those that wreck a story goes further.
Where It Shows Its Age
The acting is patchy, and a couple of line readings sound like a student film, because that’s exactly what it is. At seventy minutes, nobody gets a life outside their job in the plot. The young man is a victim, Cobb is a predator and the blonde is a lure, and none of them gets much more than that.
I’ll forgive every bit of it. Nolan made a tight, nasty little noir for the price of a used car, and he showed the whole world what he was going to do next.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Following is a small crime story told out of order, and the order is what makes it work. Rearranged chronologically, it’s a grubby little tale about a sap and a con man. Scrambled, it’s a puzzle you can’t stop picking at.
Structure is a tool. Ask where each piece of information does the most damage, and whether moving a scene earlier or later would make the reader feel it harder.
Take your twist or your big reveal and write down every fact the reader needs to understand it. Then decide, for each fact, the latest possible moment you can reveal it without cheating. Build your structure around those moments.
Seventy Minutes Well Spent
Yes. It’s an 8 because the story is tight, the con is fair and Alex Haw’s Cobb is a pleasure to watch lie. It stops at an 8 because of the patchy acting and characters who never get a life outside the plot, and I noticed that thinness in the quieter scenes. At seventy minutes it barely matters. Watch it, then watch it again for the clues you missed.
