A bullet sits in a pockmarked wall, and then it isn’t: it leaps backward across the room and snaps into the barrel of a gun that has not yet been fired. A woman in a lab watches it happen and tells the man beside her not to think about it too hard. Tenet opens on small reversals like this one — water that runs uphill, a fight where one body moves against the grain of the other — and every one of them is a rehearsal for the single idea the whole film is built to deliver.

That idea is inversion: objects, and eventually people, whose entropy runs the other way, so that for them effect arrives before cause. Christopher Nolan does not treat it as a gimmick to be revealed and spent. He treats it as architecture. The screenplay is folded down the middle so the second half re-plays the first in reverse, the action choreographed to be legible run in either direction, the title itself a palindrome lifted from an old Latin word square. The film’s most quoted line — “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” — is both its instruction to the audience and its alibi.

The structure is the star

Follow that one decision and you find the best of the film and its cost in the same place. Shot by Hoyte van Hoytema on IMAX 70mm and 65mm, the set pieces are enormous and, crucially, real: Nolan bought a decommissioned Boeing 747 and crashed it into a building rather than render it, and the climactic “temporal pincer movement” sends two teams into the same battle from opposite ends of time. Ludwig Göransson — standing in for Hans Zimmer, who was away on Dune — drives it all with a pulsing, palindromic electronic score. And here is the price: that score and the sound design sit on top of the dialogue and bury it, so the plot you are straining to follow is half-inaudible. Nolan calls the choice deliberate. It is also, by any normal measure, a thriller withholding the one thing a thriller owes you — the ability to follow what is happening.

Faces against the machine

John David Washington is athletic, watchful and charming as the Protagonist, but the part is a cipher by design — a man with no name, no past and almost no inner life, a function the plot moves through rather than a person it happens to. The warmth, and the film’s finest withheld turn, belongs to Robert Pattinson’s Neil, whose easy charm hides a reveal that quietly rearranges everything you have watched. Elizabeth Debicki gives Kat the only real ache in the picture, a mother trapped by Kenneth Branagh’s dying oligarch, Andrei Sator, who wants to take the world down with him. Branagh plays the menace broad. Debicki plays the cost true.

It arrived in the late summer of 2020 as the first studio tentpole to gamble on a wide theatrical release in the middle of a pandemic — the designated test case for whether cinemas could reopen at all. The gamble made it a lightning rod: roughly $365 million worldwide in half-empty rooms, a number that would have been a hit in any other year and read as a stumble in this one. The reception split the same way the film does. Some surrendered to the spectacle and the puzzle; others walked out unmoved, unsure, and unable to hear the explanation.

A still from Tenet (2020), directed by Christopher Nolan — Tenet (2020), directed by Christopher Nolan.

Why it earns the score

The originality is real and the craft is total — there is no other blockbuster shaped quite like this, and few directors would dare hand an audience a four-hundred-million-dollar palindrome. But the cleverness is also the ceiling. The story keeps you at arm’s length on principle; the characters are positions more than people; the famous instruction to feel rather than understand too often covers for a film that has made itself genuinely hard to feel. It is a spectacular machine, admirable from any angle and moving from almost none. You leave dazzled, and a little cold.

Tenet was released in 2020, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, photographed by Hoyte van Hoytema and scored by Ludwig Göransson. It stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh, runs 150 minutes, and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.