Christopher Nolan

It’s a fitting encounter, I guess, with the guy who, even after just five feature films, looks like the premier cinematic sleight-of-hand artist of our time. Nolan may never quite outdo “Memento,” his reverse-narrative, memory-loss murder mystery that will be blowing minds in basement rec rooms deep into this century, but he’s certainly moved on. (Nolan tells me that he’s only met one journalist who has grasped his precise intentions in “Memento,” but adds that he now considers the film “open-ended,” and believes that other people’s interpretations are as valid as his own.) He reached the franchise-movie big leagues this year with “Batman Begins,” one of the summer’s biggest hits, and hard on its heels comes “The Prestige,” a slippery, deceptive magic trick of a film that Nolan and his screenwriter brother, Jonathan, have been developing for five or six years.

While “The Prestige” has a modest budget by Hollywood standards — less than one-third of the $150 million spent on “Batman Begins” — it’s an opulent period spectacle starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale (who was also Nolan’s Batman) as rival young magicians in late-Victorian London. Adapted by the Nolan brothers from the cult novel by British science-fiction legend Christopher Priest, “The Prestige” explores the murky terrain where stage magic, genuine science and (just maybe) the supernatural come together.

Mirroring the bitter rivalry between magicians Alfred Borden (Bale), a working-class Londoner, and Robert Angier (Jackman), apparently a moneyed American, the film shows us glimpses of the real-life competition between electricity pioneers Thomas Edison (not seen in the film) and Nikola Tesla (memorably played by David Bowie). It also offers yet another terrific role for Michael Caine (who plays Alfred in “Batman Begins”) as Cutter, the wizened Cockney “ingénieur” who makes the magicians’ tricks work and serves as commentator and mediator of their feud.

As Nolan explained to me, “The Prestige” is itself structured to be deliberately deceptive. Like Angier and Borden’s stage illusions, it has three distinct phases, or “acts.” I’m sorely tempted to give you hints, but I’ll make them as general as possible. Pay attention! In the film’s earliest scenes, Nolan gives you clues that might help you figure out most of the important plot secrets, but he is of course always diverting your attention to other things. Neither Angier nor Borden is exactly what he seems to be (of course), and the nature of their relationship may also be deceptive.

During the portions of our phone call when I can actually hear him, Nolan comes across as a pleasant and self-effacing guy, not at all the coldhearted engineer some critics discern in his work. Maybe that’s just the magician’s stage manner, because when I ask him whether he sees his own works as trickery, and film in general as an elaborate game played on the audience, he cheerfully agrees.

He asks me if I’ve seen “The Prestige.” Yes, I tell him, and it’s yet another work of mind-bending deceit from the devious mind of Christopher Nolan. He laughs, and then sounds a little concerned. “But did you enjoy it?”

I tell him, yeah, I did, and it’s true. As to whether I enjoyed it as I might enjoy a really good Sudoku session, or on some possibly more profound level, I’m not quite sure. But it will keep people guessing the whole way, I promise him that.

It isn’t easy to conduct an interview about a film like this one, and Nolan makes me promise to keep certain answers — about the exact nature of the illusion known as “The Transported Man,” say, or about one character’s slightly dubious accent — off the record. “It’s a bit of a challenge,” he says. “I’ve been doing a lot of interviews with journalists, and I almost don’t know what to say without chucking the whole game.”

One thing he can do is explain the peculiar title, a term that has a specific meaning in the realm of stage magic. “The ‘prestige’ refers to the final act of a magic trick,” he says. “The last of three acts. First comes the pledge, when the magician shows you something that appears to be ordinary: a bird in a cage, or a playing card, or a woman in a box. Of course it probably isn’t something ordinary after all. Next comes the turn, when something happens” — e.g., the bird is made to disappear, or the girl in the box is sawed in half.

“Last of all, you have the prestige, which is when the magician shows you something you’ve never seen before, something completely unexpected. It refers both to the last stage of the trick and to the object, or product of that stage.” When the vanished bird is made to reappear, 10 yards away, or the sawed-in-half girl is reconnected and emerges unharmed — that’s the prestige, and the bird and the girl are themselves also the prestige. (That’s a clue, people! As Cutter repeatedly and ominously asks in the film, “Are you watching closely?”)

Early in the story, Angier and Jackman are friends, but their relationship is already prickly. They work as assistants for a mediocre magician (played in fact by master magician Ricky Jay, a key advisor on the film) and know they can do better. When an escape trick involving slipknots and a tank full of water goes wrong, however, their relationship changes forever.

After some negotiation over phrasing, Nolan offers: “I think we can say that one of them does something, or may have done something, that hurts the other one grievously. When Jona [his brother Jonathan] and I were writing the script, we really tried to find a cinematic equivalent for the way Priest’s novel manipulates and directs the reader’s sympathy. Each of these guys engages our sympathy at different times. Each of them is wronged, and each of them does terrible things. We really want it to be a fluid, unstable situation for the viewer, and in terms of which one of them you wind up rooting for, I really hope that’s an open question.”

Nolan doesn’t much try to impress us with stage magic in “The Prestige”; that’s a fairly useless thing to do in a film. Instead, he shows us how certain well-known tricks are performed: The bird made to disappear has actually been crushed to death in a collapsing trick cage sent through a trapdoor into the table, and another bird in an identical cage is produced. Is this, I ask, a metaphorical version for what happens in the movie on a grander scale?

More of that evasive laughter. “I shouldn’t like to go too far with that analogy,” he responds. “But yes, I suppose so. Without getting specific about it, there’s a cruelty and a ruthlessness to the competition between these men, and on some level neither of them is overly concerned over who gets hurt. As long as the trick works, as long as the audience is entertained. Remember that when Angier approaches Nikola Tesla and asks him to build him a machine for his stage show, Tesla asks whether Angier has considered the true cost of the machine. He doesn’t mean the price, which is also very high. He means the cost.”

At one point, Michael Caine’s character, who seems to serve as an authorial voice, offers the observation that a magician makes the real world, which is actually simple and solid all the way through, seem full of mystery. When I ask Nolan whether that’s also what the movies do, he says, “Very much so. Movies can create a realm of magic and mystery, where anything and everything is possible. I think people look to them as an escape from the predictability of ordinary life. There’s nothing wrong or shameful in that. That’s why I love movies myself.”

But does he really think, then, that the real world is devoid of mystery? “There are times when I’m afraid that’s true, yes. But in movies, in storytelling, in imagination, so many other things are true. I suppose part of me believes that if we can imagine wonderful things, create them in art or fiction, then they’re actually real.”

Fans of Priest’s novel may have a mixed response to the Nolans’ adaptation, but Nolan says the novelist read an early draft of the screenplay and liked it. “It’s a sprawling novel, very literary, and we had to find a way to translate that into a movie while holding onto its essential spirit. I hope we’ve done that, but there’s a lot of material in the book that isn’t in the film. We’ve made substantial changes, but I hope the manipulative, deceptive, shape-shifting essence of the story is intact.”

One element of Priest’s book that has been retained is the small but crucial role played by Tesla, the pioneer of alternating-current electricity, an invention that he believed could have almost metaphysical possibilities. Both the novel and Nolan’s film pivot around the idea that to most people, and perhaps even to scientists, the boundary between magic and science is never entirely clear. “No, I don’t think we know where that line is at all,” Nolan says. “I’m not convinced there even is a line. And to do the things that Tesla and Edison could do, in the context of 100 years ago, that essentially was magic.”

Angier travels to Tesla’s secret laboratory, high in the Rockies above Colorado Springs, to help him emulate Borden’s signature illusion, a vanishing act known as the Transported Man. Nolan declines to describe this trick in any detail, saying, “Let’s just say that the question of that illusion, of exactly how it’s done, and exactly what the cost will be — as Tesla says — not so much the financial cost but the human and emotional cost, is at the center of our film.”

Audiences at a magic trick are alert to the presumed danger — and, occasionally, the real danger — of what they’re watching: a bound and shackled man escaping from a tank of water, or stopping a bullet with his teeth. But Nolan believes that magic audiences, and movie audiences, are not actually bloodthirsty or heartless. “The suspension of disbelief, and the audience’s desire to be fooled, lies at the heart of both stage magic and film. The audience at a magic show does not really want to see a woman sawed in half. That would be horrifying, and not entertaining in the least.

“And, you know, much the same principle applies in the movie theater. The audience are not fools. They all understand that it’s an illusion, a show. We can show people things in films that they would be outraged or shocked to see in real life. That’s what makes it entertainment, rather than something that would be profoundly disturbing and unpleasant.”

At just 36, with only five feature films on his résumé (and the first of those, “Following,” was seen by almost nobody), Nolan has been anointed much too early, perhaps, as the next Alfred Hitchcock. But more than any other Hitchcock acolyte of the past several decades, he seems to understand on a deeply intuitive level that thrillers require a particular relationship between filmmaker and audience. You might call it honest sadomasochism, or willful deception.

After the second interruption in our conversation, Nolan’s assistant, another disembodied voice somewhere in North America, tells me that the director is running late for a meeting. I coax Nolan back onto the line for a moment to ask him about Hitchcock. Some of Hitchcock’s critics, I say, have complained that he viewed movies as a kind of elaborate practical joke he was playing on his audience. Does that describe Hitchcock fairly, and does it describe Christopher Nolan?

“Yes, it’s a fair way of describing him and a fair way of describing me,” he says, “and of course I’m flattered by the comparison. But here’s the important thing: The trick that you play on the audience is played with the audience’s collaboration. You can’t do it without them. When I go to see a film, I want to have that experience too, to be taken into a world that’s going to surprise me, perhaps shock me, show me something I haven’t seen before. And you know, with all that said, what kept me interested in this film, and in all my films, was the emotional lives of the characters, the question of what’s at stake for them and where they’re ultimately going. When you’re able to work on both those levels, well, you’ve got a movie.”

Yet this technological or generational gap — I’m not quite sure which it is, or whether those are the right terms — still exists, as evidenced by “Trust,” a movie-of-the-week-style family drama that marks the directing debut of one-time “Friends” star David Schwimmer. A sober-sided film about an undoubtedly serious subject, “Trust” stars Clive Owen and Catherine Keener as suburban Chicago parents whose family is devastated when their teenage daughter (newcomer Liana Liberato) is befriended and “groomed” online by a sexual predator who at first pretends to be a boy a little older than her. Gradually “Charlie” (Chris Henry Coffey) raises the ante: First he admits to being a college sophomore, then a grad student; and when they meet in person he turns out to be just a touch older than that.

Schwimmer sits on the board of directors of the Rape Foundation in Santa Monica, Calif., and I don’t question either his intentions or the painful reality that some teenagers really are victimized by people they meet online. But it’s difficult to make a film about sexual predation without simultaneously descending into exploitation and recovery-speak, and for all its sincerity a whole lot of “Trust” is squirm-inducing, icky and formulaic. It’s just as difficult to make a movie about youth culture on the Internet that isn’t driven by incomprehension and panic. Like so many movies about the hidden dangers of teenage life, this old-fashioned psychological drama, with its well-wrought scenes of tears and shouting and violence, is likely to strike real-life teenagers as painfully ridiculous.

To borrow the terminology of 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan, one problem may be that the Internet is inherently a “cool” medium, which delivers information in fragmentary form and fosters an attitude of savvy detachment. Movies can come in many flavors, but conventional cinema is a “hot” medium that seeks to sweep you up into a fully absorbing emotional and visceral experience. There’s no question that some filmmakers have successfully combined the two approaches, packaging a conventional “hot” character narrative inside “cooler,” geek-friendly allegories about perception and technology. That describes the “Matrix” movies, of course, along with Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” and pretty much the entire career of Christopher Nolan. (Duty propels to me to mention “The Social Network” at this point, but it doesn’t have much to do with this discussion, since it’s a movie set in the world of technology that has almost nothing to say about it.)

More often, though, you get an awkward mélange like “Trust,” which desperately labors to seem up-to-date by placing its OMGs and LOLs and PWOMS — for “parent watching over my shoulder” — on the screen as subtitles while 14-year-old Annie (Liberato) texts with the nefarious Charlie. (Schwimmer’s other choice is even more lamentable: Sometimes, for no reason beyond cheap-shot exposition, we hear Annie reading her texts out loud.) In this universe, the Internet is exclusively a channel for evil and distortion, and teenagers use it only for exchanging cryptic messages with perverts and tormenting each other with Photoshopped porn images.

Now, I could go all techno-utopian on you and argue that younger filmmakers will eventually start making better movies about the Internet. Sure, probably, maybe: There’s the much-debated documentary “Catfish,” of course, and Antonio Campos’ festival fave “Afterschool,” which brought film-school cool to a YouTube-influenced prep school drama. I think you can honestly make a case that Miranda July’s “Me and You and Everyone We Know” is the only good movie to use Internet dating as both a plot device and as subject matter; it’s like the antidote to the unbearable “You’ve Got Mail.” But I come here not to praise Internet movies but to bury them. It’s more fun to honor those films and filmmakers who’ve gotten the Internet most bafflingly wrong. If you have nominations, please chime in.

The Net Somewhere between ludicrous and ludicrously sublime, “The Net” features Sandra Bullock as the first-ever movie character to have her identity hacked on the Internet. (There have since been 287 others; I counted.) It often feels as if the screenwriters had heard words like “desktop” and “virus” but didn’t know what they meant. The important message, of course, was that “cyberspace” was dangerous. (Bullock’s character also orders a pizza on the Net, which wouldn’t become possible for several more years or common for at least a decade. Eerie!)

Hackers OK, I haven’t seen this since it came out, and let’s admit right now that “Hackers” has developed a culty second life among exactly the population it sought to inspire. I think that has more to do with the largely imaginary mid-’90s fashions, the presence of the young Angelina Jolie and with its “TRON”-inspired graphical representations of data-flow than with any kind of accuracy. Somehow the catchphrase “Hack the planet!” didn’t catch on.

Swordfish I had to dredge this one up from IMDB since I can barely remember it, but I’m afraid that Schwimmer’s “Trust” has a lot more in common with this terrible 2001 vehicle for John Travolta, Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry than it wants to. Sleek suits, atrocious hairdos and a thoroughly unfollowable plot that touches all the paranoia buttons: People on the Internet can suck all the money out of banks and replace it with kiddie porn, unless it’s the other way around.

FeardotCom No, this abominable misfire wasn’t the first horror movie about a website that kills you when you look at it (and not through boredom or laughter, either). That idea was almost old hat in Japanese horror by 2002, but “FeardotCom” — the official Warner Bros. site was called feardotcom.com, awesomely — it certainly introduced Americans to that terrifying but idiotic premise. (Which was explored in vastly superior fashion a few years later in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Pulse.”) Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone play New York detectives on the trail of a “ghost site,” i.e., a site created by ghosts seeking revenge on serial killer Stephen Rea. Since their revenge apparently consists of killing innocent people, I don’t totally get it. But whatever.

Swimfan (aka “Swimf@n”) Yeah, it’s just a teenage “Fatal Attraction” love triangle with nearly naked protagonists (Jesse Bradford, Erika Christensen and Shiri Appleby), a lot of scenes in the pool and some text messaging thrown in to seem vaguely hip. Why are you opening Hulu in a new window?

Chatroom Japanese horror director Hideo Nakata makes his Western crossover attempt with this sleek thriller starring Aaron Johnson as the ringleader of an online suicide cult, which premiered at Cannes last year. It has no United States distribution and may wind up going straight to VOD and DVD, so let’s just say that Nakata’s translation of online chat sessions into ultra-Goth party sequences are A) kind of cool to look at and B) utterly irrelevant to the actual Internet.

This movie is going to be vehemently attacked as brain-damaged garbage that exemplifies everything that’s wrong with today’s filmmaking and today’s audiences. It’s also going to be vigorously defended as a subversive action-movie masterpiece that offers a big middle finger to Hollywood convention, audience expectations, and anybody and everybody who would rather watch “The King’s Speech.” People on both sides will be partly right and partly wrong. Here’s where I come down: “Sucker Punch” doesn’t all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.

First and most obviously, “Sucker Punch” is on one level exactly what it looks like: an unzipped geek-boy fantasy about a posse of scantily clad hookers engaged in video-game style throwdowns with a villainous array of robots, monsters and dragons. You could say that Snyder tries to walk a fine line between softcore exploitation and girl-power feminism, but it’s more like he takes a big fat grade-school eraser and smudges that line into meaninglessness. Anyway, there can be no doubt that he really, really digs directing fight sequences, and as in “Watchmen” and “300,” he commands a team that delivers the best effects in the business.

At their worst, these interludes offer adrenalized action cinema that’s well above average, and at their best — like an imaginary version of World War I trench warfare, featuring zombie German soldiers reanimated with clockwork and steam power, enormous dirigible warships and a Pokémon-style Japanese battlebot — they verge on demented visionary genius. But if the ass-kicking lingerie chicks are the overly sweet chocolate in the center, the pastry around them is something else again: a self-referential movie-movie whose axis of reality keeps shifting, after the manner of “Inception” and “Shutter Island” and “The Matrix” (and almost every David Lynch movie, and a whole bunch of influences more obscure than that). And buried inside that pastry, deep within the candy-chewy, garters-and-machine-guns center, is a nugget of dark and deadly poison.

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned the movie’s actors or characters yet, which is because Snyder’s screenplay (co-written with Steve Shibuya) treats them as archetypal and almost interchangeable game-board pieces. (Unlike almost every movie made in Hollywood these days, “Sucker Punch” is not based on some preexisting “media property.” Of course, another way of putting it might be that it’s based on all of them.) His heroine is a young woman known only as Baby Doll (played by Emily Browning), who looks like a pigtailed stereotype out of jailbait pornography and barely speaks in the movie’s first half hour. We meet her in a super-stylized music-video flashback, set to a cover version of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” that explains her predicament: Her evil stepfather has framed her for the murder of her little sister, and she’s been confined to a decaying mental hospital that looks like a mixture of Sam Fuller’s “Shock Corridor,” some smutty women’s-prison movie and an Edward Gorey cartoon. Everything about the place is weird and improbable, from the severe but stylish head shrink (Carla Gugino) to the suspiciously hot fellow inmates, whom we’ll get to know later under their porny non-names: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), along with the raven-tressed Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung).

Except then the movie’s universe, or Baby Doll’s damaged psychology, skips a gear or two, and suddenly she and her peers are captives of another kind, high-priced dancers and courtesans in a decadent Gilded Age nightclub presided over by a sleazeball impresario named Blue (Oscar Isaac, a corrupt hospital orderly in reality No. 1). Gugino’s half-sympathetic doctor becomes the slinky, middle-aged Eastern European den mother, torn between sisterly loyalty and slavish obedience to Blue. Baby Doll is seen as a highly valuable new commodity, and in a few days she will be delivered to a mysterious customer known as the High Roller. (Without giving anything away about him: Cough-cough-Don Draper-cough.) Snyder is clearly a compulsive cinephile, and if you share that tendency you may spot similarities to all kinds of movies about showbiz and/or prostitution, from “Lola Montès” to “Moulin Rouge!” Unless I’m way off base, he’s also a fan of French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s “Innocence,” a creepy girls’-school allegory with some strikingly similar ingredients that was among the ignored delights of the last decade.

At any rate, in whorehouse reality Baby Doll discovers that her dancing has the power to hypnotize men, quite literally, and to transport her — and Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie and Amber, as necessary — into a video-game jukebox universe presided over by Scott Glenn, who does such a convincing impersonation of “Kung Fu”-meets-”Kill Bill” David Carradine that at first I wondered what digital tricks had been used to resuscitate him. It’s Glenn who delivers mock-military pep talks to the miniskirted fab five before every one of their fantasy missions: Disarm a bomb on a moving train, murder the baby dragon (aww!) and flee its mother, kill the robots and steal the secret German map, etc., accompanied by such bromides as “Never write a check with your mouth you can’t cash with your ass.”

I suppose it’s clear enough that the loony-bin level of “Sucker Punch” is meant to be reality, and every subsequent shift in context — up to and including the faux-medieval dragon-slaying and steampunk World War I cyborgs — is a metaphorical attempt to escape from that reality. That is, it’s accurate but inadequate; that’s both taking the movie too literally and missing its point. There’s no big puzzle to work out here, à la Christopher Nolan, and the more you pick at Snyder’s nested narratives, the more miscellaneous and nonsensical they become. (Mind you, many of Nolan’s fans also approach his movies in a wrongheaded spirit of biblical exegesis. But let’s punt the whole question of the uses of narrative instability in “Inception” and “Sucker Punch” to next year’s crop of grad students.)

It might be better to say that all levels of the story in “Sucker Punch” are self-evidently ludicrous, and that the point of the movie is the vertiginous thrill ride that takes us through them, pumped along by a dance-floor soundtrack produced by Marius De Vries and Tyler Bates (Björk, Queen and Mozart are all involved, along with covers of “White Rabbit,” “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Love Is the Drug”). If you want to understand Snyder’s central narrative gambit, it’s right there in the title. He gives us what we want (or what we think we want, or what he thinks we think we want): Absurdly fetishized women in teeny little skirts, gloriously repetitious fight sequences loaded with plot coupons, pseudo-feminist fantasies of escape and revenge. Then he yanks it all back and stabs us through the eyeball.

My task here is to convince you that “Unknown” is pretty damn good without totally overselling a film that admittedly mashes up totally familiar ingredients: a good-looking guy, an icy blonde, a missing briefcase, a car accident, a faintly sinister European city and some bad guys in a black SUV. This is a studio thriller released in February, people, not the second coming of Hitchcock. Still, keep your expectations reasonable and director Jaume Collet-Serra — undaunted by the presence of the 2005 “House of Wax” remake on his résumé — will exceed them, delivering an exciting and unjaded entertainment with tremendous atmosphere, one that will keep you guessing almost to the final frame.

There’s more than a touch of Cold War spy thriller to Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell’s script (adapted from a French novel by Didier van Cauwelaert), even though the question of who’s spying on whom and why remains mostly subterranean. From the moment Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson), an American botanist, and his wife, Liz (“Mad Men” star January Jones), arrive in Berlin for a biotechnology conference, the air seems full of secrets. Wet, driving snow obscures the war monuments and makes the driving dangerous, and by the time they reach their hotel near the Brandenburg Gate, Martin realizes what we already know: His briefcase, with all its important papers, has been left behind at the airport.

From the front desk, Liz turns and gives her husband a long, implacable stare as he grabs another cab to go retrieve the MacGuffin-ish valise. Martin won’t be seeing either the lost luggage or the wife for some time, because minutes later he and the taxi are plunging into the river Spree after a horrific accident. Heroically, the female driver smashes the rear window and pulls him out. But she then melts away into the crowd, and the next thing Martin knows, he’s waking from a four-day coma in a Berlin hospital, with no ID, no wife, no suitcase and seemingly no identity at all.

Let’s tread carefully here: “Unknown” isn’t an amnesia movie, exactly. Martin knows who he is, or at least he thinks he does, but the world doesn’t seem to agree. Oh, the staff at the Hotel Adlon confirm that Dr. and Mrs. Harris are staying there, but when Martin approaches Liz and begins explaining his absence, she cuts him off in best Hitchcockian-blonde fashion: “Excuse me — do I know you?” Yes, of course she’s with her husband, and here he is: Martin Harris, played by Aidan Quinn, complete with name tag, expensive suit and pompous demeanor. So Neeson’s version of Martin is faced with unpalatable alternatives: Either his head injury has caused dementia and disorientation, or his identity has been stolen — by unknown persons for unknown reasons — and his own wife is involved.

Saying much more would be unfair, except that there are clues all along about what’s really going on — and that I’m actually looking forward to watching this one again to see how well the mystery holds up. This isn’t exactly the most challenging or varied Liam Neeson performance, but the actor’s gloomy-growly mode works well for an utterly isolated character, pursued by shadowy villains, who must go off the grid into the Berlin underworld, where he eventually reconnects with Gina (Diane Kruger), the missing taxi driver, an Eastern European immigrant who has her own reasons for being invisible. Martin is also troubled by recurring dreams and flashbacks out of the “Inception”/”Shutter Island” playbook, which suggest that his own perception of reality is muddier than he thinks. Indeed, there are so many references to Christopher Nolan movies in “Unknown” that it approaches the level of homage (although Collet-Serra’s film is much closer to the leaner, meaner, mid-budget Nolan of years gone by than the overinflated genius of “Inception”).

Martin and Gina lead their pursuers on a couple of those high-energy, wildly careening vehicle chases I was talking about, and better still, they entrust their mystery to Ernst Jürgen (the great Bruno Ganz), a wisecracking ex-Stasi man turned slow-motion private eye, who is such a great character he deserves his own entire movie. Ernst regrets the demise of the East German security state and doesn’t care who knows it, and problems such as Martin’s do not especially surprise him. “We Germans are experts at forgetting,” he says dryly, in a voice that sounds like someone pouring coal down a chute.

Collet-Serra builds a tangible mood of menace, based partly on what we know about Germany’s past and partly on the contemporary paranoia surrounding such topics as terrorism and industrial espionage. You may or may not figure out what’s going on with the two Martin Harrises and that biotech conference, but “Unknown” is probably more about its masterful tone, style and momentum than its plot per se. (The cinematography is by Flavio Labiano, and the cool, Schubert-meets-disco score is by John Ottman and Alexander Rudd.) There’s a brief scene between Ganz and Frank Langella — two of the great actors of our time or any other — that’s worth the price of admission all by itself. I’m not entirely sure January Jones is an actress so much as a living ice sculpture, but she sure looks good in haute couture, and plays a key role in delivering a malicious little surprise just before the end of this midwinter delight.