It stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh.

The film follows a former CIA agent who is recruited into a secret organization, tasked with tracing the origin of objects that are traveling backward through time and their connection to an attack from the future to the present.

To earn Kat's help, the Protagonist and Neil try to steal the Goya from Sator's freeport facility at Oslo Airport but are thwarted by two masked men who emerge from either side of a machine.

In Oslo, Priya tells him Sator now has all nine pieces of the "Algorithm", a device that future antagonists need to invert the entropy of the world and destroy its past.

Recalling an earlier conversation with Michael Crosby, the Protagonist realizes it is a nuclear hypocenter detonated on the 14th in Sator's hometown, the Russian closed city of Stalsk-12.

Also appearing are Jefferson Hall, the "Well-Dressed Man", who the Protagonist tries to extract at the opera house; Andrew Howard as the Driver who sabotages the CIA's Kyiv operation and tortures the Protagonist; Wes Chatham as SWAT 3, a member of the Protagonist's covert CIA team in Kyiv; Denzil Smith as Sanjay Singh, Priya's husband;[18] Jeremy Theobald as the steward at the Reform Club; Laurie Shepherd as Max, Kat and Sator's son; Jack Cutmore-Scott as Klaus, an employee of security firm Rotas at the freeport in Oslo; Josh Stewart as the voice of a Tenet agent in Mumbai; and Sean Avery as the lead soldier on the Red Team.

[21][22] Inspired by a feeling about how he imagined Sergio Leone made Once Upon a Time in the West (1968),[19] Nolan avoided watching any spy films that might influence him while making Tenet, instead relying upon his memories.

[24] While the film does refer to real concepts from physics, among them annihilation,[25][26] the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon, the grandfather paradox, and Feynman and Wheeler's Absorber Theory, Nolan stated that "we're not going to make any case for this being scientifically accurate".

[40] Branagh rescheduled production on his own directorial venture Death on the Nile (2022) to take his part, claiming to have studied the manuscript more times than any other in his career.

Costume designer Jeffrey Kurland and his team cut and stitched the clothing for the film in the United States, manufacturing it for the main cast and thousands of extras.

[45] Production designer Nathan Crowley ordered around thirty military wristwatches from Hamilton Watch Company, each analog with a digital countdown.

[51][nb 3] Filming in Estonia took place in June and July, with the Linnahall, Pärnu Highway (E67), and adjacent streets closed to facilitate the production.

[55] Mayor of Tallinn Mihhail Kõlvart expressed concerns about potential disruptions, as the shooting schedule required that the arterial Laagna Road be closed for one month.

[57][58] Scenes were shot on the Amalfi Coast (Italy) and at Cannon Hall (United Kingdom) from July to August,[59][60] and on the roof of the Oslo Opera House, at The Thief hotel (Norway), and in Rødbyhavn at Nysted Wind Farm (Denmark) in early September.

[67] Production proceeded in Los Angeles, where Hawthorne Plaza Shopping Center functioned as the interior set of an icebreaker and a shipping container.

[citation needed] Outside shots of a tunnel were done in the desert, while the cavernous insides of the Hypocenter were fashioned on Warner Soundstage 16, their largest, with 32,130 square feet.

[71] Director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema employed a combination of 70 mm film and IMAX,[72] prioritizing Panavision lenses that would best accommodate lower light.

Over one hundred watercraft were recruited for the film, including two F50 catamarans,[citation needed] the superyacht Planet Nine (onto which an Mi-8 helicopter landed), an icebreaker, a cargo tanker, fishing boats, and speedboats.

[77] King got audio of both live and blank automatic weapon rounds at a gun range in San Francisquito Canyon and rented a runway to test how the vehicles in the film sound.

[87] Yohana Desta of Vanity Fair called it an "old-school surprise" and praised Göransson's score,[88] while Jim Vejvoda of IGN described it as "Inception with time travel".

[94] Eventually, after briefly being held up indefinitely,[95] Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Times noted that Warner Bros. did not put Tenet on the Academy's streaming platform or send out screeners to awards voters.

[142] Tenet divided critics, with USA Today's Jenna Ryu and the Los Angeles Times's Christi Carras respectively describing the reviews as "mixed" and "all over the place".

[145] Ellise Shafer of Variety found that, while some were weary of the film's "metaphysical babble", reviews were "largely positive", with critics overall naming it "a mind-blowing addition to Nolan's already-impressive arsenal".

[8] In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers described the film as "pure, ravishing cinema" and called Washington a "star-in-the-making" who "brings a natural athletic grace to the stunts and hand-to-hand combat".

[153] Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three and a half out of four stars, praising Debicki's "mesmerizing" portrayal and concluding that "it's the kind of film that reminds us of the magic of the moviegoing experience", despite not reaching "cinematic greatness".

[154] Keith Phipps of The Ringer wrote that Tenet has the makings of a cult film, with "a failed release due to the pandemic, a muted critical reception, and a twisty narrative that demands multiple viewings".

[158] Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter felt that Washington was "dashing but a little dull" and that Debicki's performance "adds a color to Nolan's palette, and [she] has persuasive chemistry with Branagh in their joint portrait of a violent, dysfunctional love-hate relationship".

[159] LA Weekly's Asher Luberto also highlighted the similarities between Tenet and the James Bond films, but also felt it was "a daring, surprising and entirely original piece of work, reverent in its spectacle and haunting in its mesmerizing, dreamlike form".

[166] Kathleen Sachs of the Chicago Reader gave the film one and a half out of four stars, concluding that Nolan "doesn't show much growth in his most recent self-indulgent work".

[184][183][185] Inversion allows multiple versions of a character to exist simultaneously; for instance, there are five simultaneous Neils (that are known) in the world during the moments of the climactic scene inside the Stalsk-12 hypocenter where he dies (two inverted and one normal on the battlefield, one inverted at the opera siege and one more normal somewhere else in the world who will later meet the Protagonist in Neil's first appearance of the film),[185] and the implication is that an older future Protagonist is orchestrating the events of the film behind the scenes without ever being seen by the viewer or his past self, in an example of a temporal pincer movement.