Christopher Nolan is on top of the world right now with “Inception”, but go back ten years and he was doing similar experiments with memory, time, and narrative with this mesmerizing head-scratcher, only now, thanks in part to the accolades earned here, his budget and production schedule isn’t as restricted as it was a decade ago.

The plot is relatively simple; a man with short term memory loss (Guy Pearce, in a star turn) is struggling to put the pieces of his wife’s murder together so he can enact his revenge, the trouble is, he can’t remember twenty minutes ago, let alone volumes and volumes of crucial information. Which leads us to what makes the film so groundbreaking and engrossing, Nolan’s complex structure, in which Pearce pieces everything together through Polaroids, notes, body tattoos, and physical intuition, setting up each scenario with a conclusion, and then working backwards to deliver the narrative, putting out spare bits of info, daring the viewer to conclude on what is important, and what may be a lie. If ever there was a movie that literally puts you into the head space of it’s main character, this is it.

It’s dizzying, for sure, but rewarding, and holds up under scrutiny and multiple viewings.