Tenet Review

Tenet is Christopher Nolan's purest engineering exercise, and its problems are the problems of a machine built to be admired rather than inhabited. The inversion conceit, objects and people moving backward through time within a forward-moving frame, produces set-pieces genuinely new to cinema: a hand-to-hand fight where one combatant is reversed, a highway heist replayed from the other temporal direction, and a 747 driven through a hangar for real.

Ludwig Göransson's score, built from reversible motifs, does inversion in audio. But the film explains itself constantly while remaining stubbornly hard to follow, characters exist to deliver briefings, one is literally told don't try to understand it, feel it, advice the screenplay needs the audience to take because the plot's temporal pincer logic collapses under a second look.

The notorious sound mix buries crucial dialogue under the score, a choice Nolan defended and audiences did not. John David Washington is charismatic but plays a role named the Protagonist with exactly that much interiority, and only Elizabeth Debicki, given the single human stake, and Kenneth Branagh's snarling oligarch register as people. Astonishing to watch, difficult to care about, impossible to hear.