Film review: Following (1998)

An oddity in the Criterion Channel's Film Noir selection, this is Christopher "Memento/Batman/Inception" Nolan's first film.  Filmed on weekends in London, presumably without permits and on what looks like inferior black and white film stock, it runs a lean 70 minutes but very much sets the template for later Nolan films.  It has several plot twists, it is indeed very noirish, both in its sensibility (everyone is out for themselves, nobody gets what they deserve, you can't escape your fate) and in the content (crime, murder, flashbacks and flash-forwards).  Like Memento, you can't say too much about it without ruining it, but the title comes from the fact that the main character is a disaffected unemployed would-be writer who starts following random people around London as a way to try to inspire him.  He's not very good at staying hidden, though, and soon one of the people he follows into a cafe comes and sits at his table and cross-questions him.  This person turns out not to be the businessman his suit might imply, but an odd kind of burglar who breaks into peoples' houses mainly for the thrill and to mess with the inhabitants partly out of malice but also (he claims) to help them break out of ruts.  Our "protagonist" soon joins up with him but quickly spoils things (or so we think) by falling for the attractive blonde tenant of one of the fancier places they break into.  It turns out that she has a very dangerous "ex-" - a crime boss who deals in pornography but also deals very brutally with people who cross him.  Double-dealings abound.  You can tell it's a first effort, made with non-professionals, mainly because you won't recognize any of the actors, and as they're English but aren't in either Game of Thrones or any Harry Potter film, they must be obscure.  But it's a very tightly-constructed nasty little number.  My one complaint is that if you think too hard about it, it starts seeming pretty preposterous because it relies an awful lot on one character in particular making choices that would be very hard to predict without another character being practically omnipotent.  Maybe it could be given a supernatural twist.  It would've made a great Tales of the Unexpected back in the day.