10 Psychological Thrillers That Totally Messed With Your Head

Christopher Nolan has largely built his career on large-scale films which explore unusually cerebral territory, raising questions about the nature of reality and the reliability of our own perceptions.

His 2000 breakthrough Memento set that train in motion; and, while it's made on a considerably smaller scale and lower budget than Nolan's later hit Inception, it's every bit as certain to get those neurons firing en masse.

Guy Pearce stars as Leonard, a former insurance fraud investigator whose sole driving purpose now, it seems, is to hunt down and kill the man who murdered his wife. However, this process is somewhat contemplated by the fact that Leonard suffers from anterograde amnesia, meaning his incapable of forming new memories.

Memento puts us in Pearce's shoes by telling the story backwards, with each successive scene beginning where the previous one ended. As well as demanding some hard work on the viewer's part, as the action unfolds it raises questions as to how much our own memories might deceive us, and how we might come to unwittingly deceive ourselves.

Phew. I think I might need some aspirin after all that.