The Torture Scene

This is the last segment before the movie truly begins.

Let’s rewind briefly. At the rally point in the Opera House basement, the Protagonist orders the American guest to switch clothes with one of his team members. Before leaving with the “fake” guest, he asks the real one about his escape plan. The guest explains that he intended to take a subterranean tunnel and flee through the sewers. The Protagonist instructs the rest of his team to follow that plan. “I no longer trust our escape route,” he says. Then he and the fake guest return to the theater hall, gather all the bombs, and throw them into an empty balcony, where they explode safely away from the unconscious audience.

By now, the Protagonist and the fake guest sprint toward the military vehicle they originally arrived in. The truck is no longer facing the Opera House; it has been repositioned toward the exit, engine running, back doors open. They jump inside and slam the doors shut, only to be ambushed. One man immobilizes the fake guest and announces in Ukrainian, “He’s not the guy.” Another holds the Protagonist at gunpoint.

There are many things one could say about this moment, but the most important is that the Protagonist’s intuition was correct. He was right not to trust the original escape plan.

The second part of this segment is the torture scene.

As CIA operatives, both the Protagonist and the fake guest carry cyanide pills for use as a last resort. It’s telling that the fake guest remembered to remove the pill from his lapel when he switched clothes with the real guest.

The transition into the torture scene is abrupt, one of the many sudden spatial jumps in the film. It feels as though the viewer is being teleported from one fragment of the narrative to another. The movie often behaves like a collage: disparate pieces overlapping to form a puzzle that we sense would make perfect sense if only we could decipher it. And if we could decipher it, it would likely resemble the Sator Square.

Now the viewer finds themselves in a desolate industrial wasteland: barren fields, multiple rail tracks, stationary and moving freight trains on both sides. The Protagonist is tied to a wooden chair, arms bound behind him. A tall, bald thug is torturing him with a large army knife. He has already pulled out all of the Protagonist’s teeth. The Protagonist is exhausted, in pain, but the film shows no gore, no blood, no graphic wounds. Throughout “Tenet,” the violence is psychological rather than visceral.

The fake guest lies five feet ahead, tied to a similar chair that has been knocked over. He appears unconscious. Both chairs sit directly on a railway track. A battered wooden table stands nearby, with a square yellow clock resting on it. It reads six o’clock.

Thugs in symbolic films often double as philosophers. “A man can be trained to withstand torture for eighteen hours,” the hoodlum muses as the Protagonist begins to faint. He gestures toward the fake guest. “He couldn’t withstand eighteen minutes.”

Then he slices open the Protagonist’s lapel and extracts a small gray cylinder. “Or were you counting on this?” he sneers. “Death. From the CIA.”

The thug has the stereotypical look of a Russian mobster, and it’s unclear whether he later appears as one of Sator’s men. But the cyanide pill he extracts will be mirrored later in the film, when Sator shows his wife a similar pill and claims it came from the CIA. If the thug is indeed connected to Sator, then Sator’s pill may be the very one taken from the Protagonist.

The thug points to the clock and announces that the torture will continue until seven. An hour later, he seems impatient. The clock reads ten minutes to seven. He picks it up and reveals that it is set an hour fast. He winds it back to six. The torture continues.

Suddenly, the Protagonist notices the fake guest’s hand moving. The man is offering him his cyanide pill. As the thug watches a passing freight train, the Protagonist digs his toes into the dirt, lunges forward, grabs the pill with his lips, and swallows it.

The thug rushes over, shouting for him to spit it out, but it’s too late. The Protagonist stares at him as the image blurs. The title fades in: TENET. The movie has officially begun.

Later, we learn that this entire ordeal was a test, one the Protagonist passed by taking the pill. The operation was orchestrated by a secret organization called TENET. The title appears at the moment he swallows the pill because that is the moment he is admitted into the organization.

TENET restores his health and even replaces his teeth. But before moving on, let’s take a look at the cheap psychological tricks used by the torturers: a) the contrast between enduring eighteen hours versus eighteen minutes, and b) resetting the clock. Both gestures hint at the film’s central concerns: the relativity of time and the manipulation of time. These themes will dominate everything that follows.