Christopher Nolan’s Forgotten Debut Just Got a Rotten Tomatoes Upgrade Right Before ‘The Odyssey’ Hits Theaters

Christopher Nolan is having a moment right now, and it has nothing to do with Matt Damon or a giant Cyclops. As ‘The Odyssey’ barrels toward its wide release, fans have been revisiting the director’s entire filmography, tracing the throughline from his scrappiest work to his most expensive one yet.

That trip down memory lane usually starts and ends with ‘Memento,’ but the true beginning of Nolan’s career is a lot less glamorous. It’s ‘Following,’ a black and white noir he shot on weekends in London back in 1998, using friends, borrowed apartments, and whatever light happened to be available that day.

Rotten Tomatoes just gave that scrappy little film a fresh coat of validation. The outlet announced on X that its archival team added fourteen contemporaneous reviews to ‘Following’ that had never been logged into the system, and that update was enough to push the movie over the line into Certified Fresh territory. The film now holds an 87 percent score.

That jump is more significant than it might sound. The film’s tally has grown to a total of 89 reviews as older write ups continue getting folded into its page, a climb from a score that reportedly sat closer to 80 percent when only around 20 reviews were counted toward it. To qualify for Certified Fresh status, a film needs a Tomatometer score of at least 75 percent along with a minimum of five reviews from Top Critics, and titles in limited release specifically need at least 40 reviews counted toward that total.

‘Following’ clears those numbers comfortably now, and this kind of archival deep dive apparently isn’t unique to Nolan. Rotten Tomatoes recently did something similar for 1996’s ‘Independence Day,’ which reached Certified Fresh status after 77 contemporaneous reviews from its original theatrical run were added to its page.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, ‘Following’ tells the story of a struggling writer who starts tailing strangers through London and gets pulled into a criminal underworld after he fails to keep his distance. Nolan used a non-linear plot structure for the film, the same device he would return to again and again in ‘Memento,’ ‘The Prestige,’ ‘Dunkirk,’ ‘Tenet’ and ‘Oppenheimer.’ He has described the film’s production as extreme even by low-budget standards, filming without professional lighting equipment and relying mostly on available light.

Critics at the time and since have generally treated it as a remarkably assured calling card. TV Guide once called it short, sharp and tough as nails, praising its fast-paced storytelling and tricky, triple-tiered flashback structure, while The New Yorker compared it to Hitchcock, just leaner and meaner.

The timing of this refreshed score is hardly a coincidence. ‘The Odyssey,’ Nolan’s massive Matt Damon-led epic, opens in theaters on July 17, and its scale could not be further from the homemade world of ‘Following.’ Having his very first feature freshly stamped as Certified Fresh gives longtime fans one more piece of evidence that Nolan’s instincts were fully formed long before IMAX cameras and nine figure budgets entered the picture.

It also reframes ‘Following’ as more than a curiosity for completionists. It’s a tight, hour long fable about obsession and identity that already contains the DNA of everything Nolan would go on to build, structure, restraint and a fascination with unreliable perspective. Watching it now, right before ‘The Odyssey’ lands, feels less like homework and more like context.

Does knowing where Nolan started change how you think about where ‘The Odyssey’ is headed?