4 Movies That Told Their Stories In Reverse Order Before Christopher Nolan’s Memento

Christopher Nolan’s breakout hit Memento felt groundbreaking in its time for narrating its entire storyline in reverse order, taking first-time viewers by surprise. Based on the short story Memento Mori by his brother Jonathan Nolan, the 2000 psychological thriller followed the disturbed life of Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator with short-term memory loss. Clinging on to the fragments of his memory through Polaroid photographs and tattoos, Shelby seeks the murderer of his wife throughout the movie. Shot in both color and black-and-white sequences, the many strands of Memento’s narrative merge into a cohesive story toward the shocking third act.