“everybody has a box.”

this line is spoken by the more attractive but morally seedier of two main characters in christopher nolan’s 1998 film ‘following’, and he refers to a little box of photos and mementos that everyone supposedly has. the two characters, bill and cobb, know this because they are burglars. sort of. bill is a greasy unemployed writer who is so bored and lonely that he starts following random strangers. cobb is a well dressed stranger who notices and confronts him, and it turns out that cobb likes following people too. they start breaking into apartments and houses together, not even necessarily to steal, but to mess things up a bit, for instance, cobb steals lingerie from one apartment and leaves it in another. cobb doesn’t seem like a very nice man. bill’s just pathetic and goes along with it, even helping cobb break into his own apartment, which makes him seem even more pathetic than usual. this is all very well and good until bill meets an odd blonde and it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

the style of the film is very much like that of ‘∏’, albeit less twitchy. black and white, I think the word ‘spare’ sums up the atmosphere pretty well. it’s pretty painfully low-budget, but that wouldn’t really matter so much but for the fact that the acting is just not particularly good. the flash-forwards and backs are hard to follow, and you can only really tell because bill gets a haircut halfway through the film. you really shouldn’t base a timeline on a haircut. the story, though, is very good, with a couple of terrific twists, although you can see the last one coming just a bit too soon. more than anything, this film seems like a dry run for ‘memento’…..