Inception

Originally published on 28/01/22 on Letterboxd

You’ve heard all this before but this really is a genuinely remarkable work on obsession that happens to be the creation of someone as obsessed with the mechanics of his world as the characters that occupy it. Far from empty spectacle, every environmental shift and movement here is a cog in an engine of catharsis, being put together line by line and then stripped back to their barest forms. To be faced with the reconciliation of parent and child across multiple levels of dreams and then still declare that Nolan is somehow solely concerned with mechanics is frankly bizarre because between this and Interstellar, he’s actively rejecting the very notions of objectivism that have somehow come to shape the popular perception of him as an artist. Far from trying to make a statement or attempting to define anything at all, here he accepts the centrality of his obsessions to himself whilst simultaneously refusing to accept that they’re all that he is.

Nolan isn’t Cobb, of course, but what does it matter anyway, when he so clearly believes in cinema as a cathartic power that can reshape reality to the extent that the image is as real as whatever it's capturing?