This time-bending thriller might just rewind lockdown’s effect on cinemas
Tenet
Christopher Nolan
★★★★★
Can Christopher Nolan’s new film save British cinemas? Almost two months after venues tentatively began to reopen, box office takings are still only six per cent of where they were last year – which means in order to survive the autumn, the sector needs a serious hit. Against that desolate backdrop, enter Tenet.
As the closely guarded new blockbuster from the director of Dunkirk and the Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan’s 11th feature would have been hotly anticipated stuff even if the industry hadn’t been closing in on collapse: as it is, it feels like cinema’s last hope.
Can it pull off the rescue in time? It’s certainly good enough to deserve to: an icily glamorous spy thriller in which time itself often runs backwards, it’s a consummate eye-popper and breath-stopper in the grand old Nolan style, and a feat of often staggering imaginative force.
What may also help spur the revival is that you will have to see it at least three times to be sure you have understood it.
Its protagonist is known as nothing more than The Protagonist, and is played outstandingly by John David Washington, whose way of combining desperation with urbanity and grace calls to mind James Stewart’s great performances for Alfred Hitchcock in films such as Rope and Rear Window (as do his tremendous suits).
Washington is a secret agent who is investigating a strange new blackmarket technology that is capable of “inverting the entropy” of people and objects. It all comes down to nuclear fission, apparently, but what matters about it is this: the process switches the direction in which its target moves through time, at least as we perceive it.
“Don’t try to understand it, feel it,” Clémence Poésy’s physics whizz suggests: sound advice, since the plot is quite literally the opposite of straightforward. As Washington investigates the provenance of inverted bullets – “relics of a future war”, Poésy calls them – he is drawn into a far-reaching conspiracy involving the Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (an enjoyably blood-curdling Kenneth Branagh), a child of one of the Soviet “hidden cities” of the Cold War era whose temporal meddlings could end up jackknifing reality itself.
Plotting, choreographing and editing Tenet must have been a living nightmare – there are sequences here, including a good hour-long section in the middle of the film, that unfold in both chronological directions at once. Yet watching it is thrillingly intuitive.
As for the parts you won’t, and can’t, appreciate first time around – well, as cinema managers everywhere will be quick to tell you, rewatching is always an option.
Washington, you’ll be relieved to hear, is as adrift in all of this as we are. But at least he has a handful of allies, foremost among them Robert
Pattinson’s Neil, a crumpled expat he meets in Mumbai, on a mission that involves a reverse bungee-jump up a crumbling high-rise. Michael Caine, Nolan’s longtime talisman, plays a silvery MI6 spook in a single scene that’s by turns droll and poignant, while Elizabeth Debicki is the uppercrust English wife of Branagh’s oligarch, an inspired 21st-century spin on the Hitchcock blonde.
The depth, subtlety and wit of Pattinson and Debicki’s performances only become fully apparent once you know where Tenet is going, or perhaps where it’s been. Still confused? Don’t be. Or rather do be, and savour it. This is a film that will cause many to throw up their hands in bamboozlement – and many more, I hope, to clasp theirs in awe and delight.
Dir: Christopher Nolan; starring: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Aaron Taylor-johnson, Himesh Patel, Clémence Poésy, Michael Caine.
12A cert, 149 mins.
‘It’s a consummate eye-popper and breathstopper in the grand old Nolan style’