20 Movie Reveals Nobody Noticed
18. Leonard Is Sammy - Memento
Early on in Christopher Nolan's astonishing mystery-thriller Memento, amnesia-riddled protagonist Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) tells the tale of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a fellow amnesiac who accidentally killed his wife by giving her an insulin overdose due to having no memory of previously injecting her.
Near the end of the film, however, we find out that Sammy's story is really Leonard's - Leonard accidentally killed his own wife and, while racked with traumatic guilt, cooked up a false murder-mystery story to help repress the truth.
But there's a brilliant visual hint at this a little while before the truth finally comes out - when Nolan cuts back to Sammy at one point, Sammy is briefly replaced by Leonard for a few fractions of a second.
The significance of the image may not be immediately clear to first-time viewers, but the visual language nevertheless nods to the fact that, in terms of this story, Sammy and Leonard are one and the same.