Tenet

Armed with a single word (the palindrome Tenet), nameless CIA agent (John David Washington as a “Black Bond”) sets off in search of the source of “inverted ammunition” – objects encoded backwards in time. On his mission, which seems to unfold beyond real-life temporality, he meets the Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who deals in plutonium and seemingly functions as an intermediary between future and present. “Christopher Nolan’s films play with fast forwarding to the end, the intermingling of different temporalities, a non-chronological approach, the causal fusion of different levels of time, deception, emptiness – and ultimately the loss of an identity which would like to be reconstituted. In this existential, philosophical experimentation with different means of cinematic expression, TENET forms a highpoint in Nolan’s oeuvre. The visualization of several levels in time in a single image is aesthetically virtuoso and mounted by way of technical innovation, allowing the multiple coding of the film as a firework display of action, a thriller and a philosophical essay to succeed in lasting fashion.” (Marcus Stiglegger)