Christopher Nolan layers his screenplays with many instances of recurrence to create the big twist endings that he’s famous for. Recurrence is continued repetition, often reappearing in a patterned manner. The nonlinear structure of Nolan films constantly flashes back and forth between distinct timelines, adding more and more context to each timeline with each recurrence until, ultimately, everything makes sense. Nolan constantly presents the audience with all of the answers throughout his films, but it’s difficult to know what exactly to look for (until Nolan shows them, right at the very end). His use of recurrence is on display in “Following,” “Memento,” “The Prestige,” “Inception,” “Interstellar,” and even “Dunkirk” to a lesser extent.
