This is the Christopher Nolan film that fans will never be able to watch

When someone reaches Christopher Nolan’s level of fame, every part of their life and every piece of their work becomes the subject of scrutiny for scholars and movie fans around the world. People want to know everything: his childhood, his earliest steps in the industry, and the path that led him to become the creative force behind films like Interstellar and Inception.

The line between the personal and the professional tends to disappear. The public eye is relentless and insatiable. It is difficult to escape that kind of curiosity or keep certain things hidden from view.

And yet, Nolan seems to have done exactly that with one specific piece of his work, a film surrounded by mystery and myth: Larceny, his second short film and by far the most inaccessible title in his body of work.

Nolan’s filmography is well documented and has been dissected in remarkable detail. A great deal is known about Following, his first feature film. He wrote, produced, directed, and edited it himself over the course of a year in his native London, relying on friends and acquaintances to shoot on Saturdays, when everyone could carve out a little time from their jobs.

It was an impressive achievement, made by stretching a budget of just £3,000, or roughly $3,800 in today’s terms, to its absolute limit. Its nonlinear structure surprised and captivated critics and producers alike, enough to open the door for him to make Memento and begin his ascent in Hollywood.

A fair amount is also known about the short films Nolan made before Following. Many of them were experiments, as a young Nolan, determined to work in the film industry, tested techniques, used glass in front of the camera to create distortion effects, and learned the fundamentals of filmmaking through hands-on practice.

We have been able to see Doodlebug, the tense black-and-white short with clear echoes of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It is readily available and was included in Criterion’s release of Following.

We have also seen his early venture into horror with Tarantella, his first short made in collaboration with Roko Belic, in which Nolan even appears as an actor. That film surfaced almost miraculously through a connection to a Chicago television studio.

Although it was quickly targeted by Nolan’s legal representatives, it can still be found online without much difficulty. Once something like that gets out, it is nearly impossible to bury again.

But Larceny, his second short film and the first one produced entirely by Nolan himself, remains unavailable, locked away despite years of determined efforts to bring it to light and complete the puzzle of his formative years as a filmmaker.

What makes Larceny so special?

The New York Times launched an investigation into the film a few months before Nolan was crowned with the Oscar for Oppenheimer, but came up empty-handed.

What is known is this: the film runs for about eight minutes, was shot in black and white on 16 mm film, and centers on the burglary of an apartment. It screened at the 1996 Cambridge Film Festival and then vanished. Its existence is only confirmed through a few VHS copies that, if they still survive at all, are unlikely ever to be shared.

Everyone involved in the production declined to speak about it, with one exception: Jeremy Theobald, one of the actors and the star of Following. “It was clever,” Theobald said. “It was funny, sharp, and dark. It had a great twist ending.”

The story reportedly revolved around a home break-in in which something unexpected happens, and some have speculated that it may be connected to a real-life experience of Nolan’s, after his own home was burglarized.

The only thing Nolan himself has said is that he prefers to keep the film private. He has also described it, along with Doodlebug, as more of a technical exercise leading up to Following: a way of figuring out how to make a feature film on the smallest possible budget and under the limited conditions available to him at the time.

But why release Doodlebug and not Larceny? No one knows. There is no public explanation. Still, Nolan’s wishes on the matter have been clear, and the few people who may still have access to the film appear to have respected them, which has only deepened the mystery.

There has been no shortage of speculation about why Nolan has kept the short under wraps. Is it perhaps too similar to Following? Does it deal with subject matter he would rather not revisit publicly? Is its twist so strong that he wants to save it for a future feature film?

Or perhaps the simplest explanation, applying Occam’s razor, is the right one: he just is not proud of that particular work and has no interest in letting anyone see it.

As with so many mysteries, the mystery itself is almost certainly more fascinating than the answer hidden inside it. But the curiosity will never go away, and Nolan’s most dedicated fans are unlikely to stop chasing it.

As Letterboxd user Dan DeLaPorte put it, capturing the mood of the community: “When I meet God, I won’t ask about the scrolls from the Library of Alexandria, I’ll shake him down for this lost film.”

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