Five mind-bending Christopher Nolan movies on Netflix
Christopher Nolan made Following in 1998 for about $6,000, shooting on weekends because less money still means more problems. And can you believe this is the same man who, nearly three decades later, gave us The Odyssey with a thumping $250million budget?
From six grand to a quarter of a billion, that’s some growth.
Look at his career now: six grand might feel small now, but two years later, he gave the world Memento, and Hollywood had to take notice. Then Warner Bros handed him Batman Begins and, well, that escalated quickly. Nolan went from shoestring noir to rebuilding Batman for the big screen, while Emma Thomas, his wife and producing partner, stayed beside him through every feature.
By the time Oppenheimer was released in 2023, the scale was bonkers. The film made more than $900m worldwide and won seven Oscars, with Nolan taking ‘Best Director’.
This means that is plenty of Nolan on Netflix for a good binge, but these five movies are a great way into his most mind-bending work.
Five mind-bending Christopher Nolan movies on Netflix
Inception (2010)
Christopher Nolan said Inception’s cross-cutting climax was the idea he started to work with and then spent about ten years figuring out how to reach it. It’s amusing how the more you know about the film, the more eccentric it gets.
We have Leonardo DiCaprio playing Dom Cobb, a thief who enters dreams to steal secrets before taking on a much trickier job: planting an idea inside someone’s mind. A few dream levels in, time starts going haywire, which it was bound to. All they have to worry about is getting back now! Yeah, good luck.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy are part of Cobb’s crew, while Elliot Page plays architect Ariadne. Did you know that the zero-gravity corridor fight was shot on a rotating set, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey? No green-screen cop-out there, people.
Interstellar (2014)
From dreams, Nolan shoots his rocket straight into deep space, because when has normal time been enough for this man? Interstellar follows Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), a former Nasa pilot stuck on an Earth where crop blight is wrecking the food supply.
He leaves his daughter, Murph, behind to fly through a wormhole, hoping to find somewhere humanity can keep going. But the twist here is that a few hours for Cooper can mean years passing back home.
Anne Hathaway plays scientist Amelia Brand, while Jessica Chastain plays the adult Murph. Nolan also brought physicist Kip Thorne aboard as scientific consultant and executive producer, and the work on Gargantua actually led to published research on gravitational lensing. Yes, a blockbuster ended up producing physics papers.
Tenet (2020)
By Tenet, Nolan had decided ordinary time was far too cooperative. So in comes a spy thriller where bullets fly backwards, and people move against the flow of time, and cause and effect stop playing a fair game.
John David Washington is the protagonist who is pulled into a covert operation chasing Russian oligarch Andrei Sator, whose plans are tied to technology from the future. The science behind it is that inversion is entropy running in reverse. Yes, yes, it might be a little too scientific for everyone, but you’ve got to keep up.
Robert Pattinson plays Neil, while Elizabeth Debicki gets trapped in Sator’s world. Then Nolan does the most Nolan thing imaginable. Need to crash a plane into a hangar? The guy bought a real Boeing 747 and did it properly. Apparently, that made more sense than miniatures or CGI. The film was shot across seven countries, too. Naturally. After all that madness, The Prestige looks smaller, but simpler? Not a chance.
The Prestige (2006)
Now enough with that dream and time jibber-jabber, because before Nolan was into all that, he was busy messing with the audience.
The Prestige, adapted from Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel, pits Hugh Jackman’s Robert Angier against Christian Bale’s Alfred Borden, two magicians whose rivalry turns vicious after a stage accident. And as the title says, it comes to each safeguarding their prestige, and that soon turns into an obsession. At this point, neither man seems bothered about what it costs to win.
Michael Caine plays engineer Cutter, but then David Bowie turns up as Nikola Tesla, and getting him there took some doing. Bowie initially said no, so Nolan went back and personally made his case, later admitting he couldn’t picture anyone else in the role. The whole film works like the trick it’s showing you: keep your eyes over here while the real answer slips past you.
Memento (2000)
Memento is the film where Nolan basically told audiences: pay attention, or good luck! Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a man with anterograde amnesia who cannot make new long-term memories after the attack that killed his wife. So how do you hunt for someone when your own brain keeps betraying you? Polaroids, scribbled notes and tattoos: whatever works!
The idea came from Nolan’s brother Jonathan during a road trip while his short story Memento Mori was still under work. Christopher then split the film into two: the colour scenes run backwards, while the black-and-white sections move forwards until everything finally comes together.
Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano make Leonard’s search even murkier, because trusting anyone here is asking for trouble. Made for about $4.5million, Memento became Nolan’s breakthrough and earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.