We were all wrong about Tenet being twaddle – thank God Netflix is giving it a second life

Christopher Nolan’s time-bending thriller was derided upon its release for being cold and confusing. Three years later, its arrival on Netflix may have given ‘Tenet’ a new lease on life – one that Louis Chilton thinks is richly deserved

Unstuck in time: Elizabeth Debicki in ‘Tenet’ (Melinda Sue Gordon)

On paper, it’s ridiculous to describe a $200m blockbuster as a “cult” film. Yet the phrase seems kind of apt when we’re talking about Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s tortuous 2020 thriller about a world in which people have discovered the ability to reverse the flow of time. Released in cinemas just months into the Covid pandemic – sandwiched awkwardly between lockdowns – Tenet was the biggest flop of the popular filmmaker’s career, making just $365.3m globally. More than this, though, the film also enjoyed a dubious reception from critics. It embodied all of Nolan’s worst tics. It was confusing. Emotionally antiseptic. Loosely sexist. It was an intricate puzzle box with nothing inside. Or so most everybody said.

Now, roughly three years after the film’s release – and a few months after Nolan’s coruscating comeback Oppenheimer – Tenet has made its way onto Netflix and shot up the film rankings. In recent years, the streaming service has demonstrated an uncanny ability to unearth hidden gems (or, some might say, to resuscitate old dreck). In an era when many people have stopped buying and renting DVDs, many people’s viewing choices rely wholly on the comings and goings of Netflix’s catalogue. It’s the perfect context for a film like Tenet, a big, expensive-looking blockbuster that many people would have missed when it first came out. Next to Netflix’s assortment of drab, cheap-looking original films, it stands out as a work of high and impressive grandeur. Whisper it – or don’t, lest people whinge about bad sound mixing – but Tenet may end up one of the decade’s most enduring blockbusters.

If you watch enough films, you start to grow weary seeing the same stuff over and over. The language of cinema is vast and multifarious, but contemporary blockbusters tend to use only a very limited vocabulary. For all its flaws and pretensions, Tenet contains countless moments that feel new, and original. The complaints about Nolan’s coldness, the film’s spidery self-indulgence, are valid but beside the point.  For a film that’s positively bursting at the seams with plot, Tenet is best enjoyed as a work of images and ideas.

Take, for instance, the film’s centrepiece sequence, building up to the moment John David Washington’s unnamed protagonist first travels through the machine that inverts time. He has just been in a frantic car chase on a highway – vehicles going forwards and backwards in time; bullets whizzing – when he is dragged into a big, bifurcated chamber by Kenneth Branagh’s villain, Andrei Sator. On one side of the chamber, Branagh is travelling backwards in time, holding Elizabeth Debicki at gunpoint. On the other, travelling forwards, he is yelling at Washington, demanding information.

It is hard to follow exactly what’s going on in this scene – not impossible – but it ultimately doesn’t matter. The time-bending machine itself is a wonderful piece of set design, a brutalist concrete mechanism featuring two muscular revolving turnstiles. We never see the inside of the machine – a shrewd piece of obfuscation that makes the whole thing feel more plausible. The moment of Branagh speaking backwards is indelibly strange; when we see the scene again from his backwards perspective, it’s just as uncanny.

Tenet is a film that rewards repeat viewings, though returning to the well doesn’t guarantee any clearer an understanding of what’s actually going on. What a rewatch does offer, however, is a slackening of expectations, a certain experiential looseness. In the way that some films are “so bad they’re good”, Tenet is a film that’s so smart that it’s dumb, best enjoyed as a frenzy of style and spectacle. But what a spectacle it is.

We never really know which films will endure within the popular imagination. With the industry increasingly falling back on reboots and iterative franchise filmmaking, it feels like there are fewer and fewer works of any lasting originality finding a mass audience. Maybe Tenet bucks this trend. If not in 2020, then now, on Netflix. If not now, then a decade down the line. Time isn’t just Nolan’s obsession – it may well be his film’s saviour.