This book offers the first full-length study devoted to Tenet (2020), presenting Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster as both a mind-bending puzzle film and a story shaped by climate crisis and quantum theory. It argues that beneath the film’s complex time inversion narrative lies a layered exploration of ecological anxiety, political responsibility, and the limits of human agency in a world governed by temporal paradox. By tracing connections to Nolan’s earlier films, the opening chapter positions Tenet as the culmination of his long-standing interest in narrative complexity and cinematic experimentation. After clarifying the film’s structure, explaining its palindrome chronology in clear and accessible terms, the book situates Tenet within the broader tradition of contemporary puzzle films and time-travel cinema, showing how its cognitive challenges both engage and distract viewers. Looking under the labyrinthine surface, subsequent chapters uncover the film’s environmental subtext, examining how climate collapse operates as a hidden but powerful narrative force. The discussion also explores the role of quantum theory and parallel worlds, considering how these ideas complicate questions of fate, free will, and accountability. Combining close analysis, cognitive and narrative theories, and political interpretation, this study speaks to scholars and general readers interested in film studies, time travel stories, complex cinema, and the cultural imagination of climate change.

Miklós Kiss is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Arts and Cognition at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, University of Groningen. His research examines contemporary audiovisual media through intersecting narrative and cognitive approaches. He has published widely in leading journals, including Projections, Scope, Senses of Cinema, NECSUS, New Cinemas, Convergence, and New Review of Film and Television Studies. He served on the editorial board of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies and is a Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI). He is co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video (2016) and Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (2017), and co-editor of Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Film, Television and Literature (2022).