The film follows Leonard Shelby (Pearce), a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia—resulting in short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories—who uses an elaborate system of photographs, handwritten notes, and tattoos in an attempt to uncover the perpetrator who killed his wife and caused him to sustain the condition.

The black-and-white sequences begin with Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator, in a motel room speaking to an unseen and unknown caller.

After tests confirmed Sammy's inability to learn tasks through repetition, Leonard believed that his condition was at best psychological and turned down his insurance claim.

After hearing Teddy confess all of this, Leonard burns the photograph of the dead Jimmy and the photo of himself right after killing the real attacker a year ago, pointing to his chest where he would get a tattoo to document his successful revenge.

Stefano Ghislotti wrote an article in Film Anthology[11] which discusses how Nolan provides the viewer with the clues necessary to decode the plot as we watch and help us understand the chronology.

Jonathan wrote the short story simultaneously, and the brothers continued to correspond, sending each other subsequent revisions of their respective works.

However, in the short story, Earl convinces himself through his own written notes to escape the mental institution and murder his wife's killer.

[19] In July 1997, Christopher Nolan's girlfriend (later wife) Emma Thomas showed his screenplay to Aaron Ryder, an executive for Newmarket Films.

[5] Pre-production lasted seven weeks, during which the main shooting location changed from Montreal, Quebec to Los Angeles, California, to create a more realistic and noirish atmosphere for the film.

[24][25] After being impressed by Carrie-Anne Moss's performance as Trinity in the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix, Jennifer Todd suggested her for the part of Natalie.

However, one week before shooting began, the company placed several dozen train carriages outside the building, making the exterior unfilmable.

Julyan acknowledges several synthesized soundtracks that inspired him, such as Vangelis's Blade Runner and Hans Zimmer's The Thin Red Line.

[38] While composing the score, Julyan created different, distinct sounds to differentiate between the color and black-and-white scenes: "brooding and classical" themes in the former, and "oppressive and rumbly noise" in the latter.

Although most of the executives loved the film and praised Nolan's talent, all passed on distributing the picture, believing it was too confusing and would not attract a large audience.

Clicking on highlighted words in the article leads to more material describing the film, including Leonard's notes and photographs as well as police reports.

[49] The filmmakers employed another tactic by sending out Polaroid pictures to random people, depicting a bloody and shirtless Leonard pointing at an unmarked spot on his chest.

[50] Sold to inexpensive cable channels like Bravo and A&E, and websites such as Yahoo and MSN, the trailers were key to the film gaining widespread public notice.

[51] The DVD menus are designed as a series of psychological tests; the viewer has to choose certain words, objects, and multiple choice answers to play the movie or access special features.

Some of the "materials" seem designed to induce paranoia and uncertainty (a picture of one person whispering to another is captioned, "They know what you did"), alluding to Shelby's mental state.

This release lacks the special features contained on the Limited Edition DVD, but does include the audio commentary by director Christopher Nolan.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Christopher Nolan skillfully guides the audience through Memento's fractured narrative, seeping his film in existential dread.

Marjorie Baumgarten wrote, "In forward progression, the narrative would garner little interest, thus making the reverse storytelling a filmmaker's conceit.

"[61] Sean Burns of the Philadelphia Weekly commented that "For all its formal wizardry, Memento is ultimately an ice-cold feat of intellectual gamesmanship.

[66] Memento was considered "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the US Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017, the first narrative feature of the 2000s to be honored.

Sternberg concludes: This thought-provoking thriller is the kind of movie that keeps reverberating in the viewer's mind, and each iteration makes one examine preconceived notions in a different light.

Apparently inspired partly by the neuropsychological studies of the famous patient HM (who developed severe anterograde memory impairment after neurosurgery to control his epileptic seizures) and the temporal lobe amnesic syndrome, the film documents the difficulties faced by Leonard, who develops a severe anterograde amnesia after an attack in which his wife is killed.

And when he isn't outright lying to himself, he's guilty of confirmation bias, accepting only the facts that affirm his pre-cooked conclusions, and tossing out all the rest.

"[74] Author Chuck Klosterman has written in-depth about Memento in his essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, specifically on the diner scene with Leonard and Natalie.

[75] In an interview with Chuck Stephens for Filmmaker in 2001, Nolan also stated: The most interesting part of that for me is that audiences seem very unwilling to believe the stuff that Teddy [Pantoliano] says at the end and yet why?

Monika Bacardi, an executive for AMBI Pictures, stated that they plan to "stay true to Christopher Nolan's vision and deliver a memorable movie that is every bit as edgy, iconic and award-worthy as the original".