Tenet

Terrorists attack the Opera house in Kiev, and the Protagonist participates in a joint CIA special operation with Russian mercenaries to rescue a cargo of plutonium and prevent a terrorist attack. The CIA transfers plutonium from the site of the attack to the security Service of Ukraine. They redirect it to Tallinn for storage. In Kiev, the hero first encounters the phenomenon of inversion from a stranger who saved him. Russian mercenaries realize that they have been deceived and torture the Protagonist, but he manages to swallow a capsule that was supposed to contain poison. When the Protagonist regains consciousness, he is turned over to the organization "Argument", whose goal is to prevent the Third world war. He is given a new task, as well as taught a special gesture and the code word "argument", which "will open many doors". In Scandinavia, he learns about a technology from the future that reverses the entropy of items, which causes items to move back in time.

After tracking the bullet, the Protagonist, together with the British special agent Neil, go to the arms dealer Priya in the Indian city of Mumbai and learn that the Russian oligarch Andrey Sator has inversion technologies, who has established contact with certain people from the distant future. The protagonist wants to get to Sator through His wife kat, who works as an art appraiser. It turns out that the arms dealer keeps his wife near him with violence and blackmail. To gain kat's trust, the Protagonist and his colleagues decide to steal a fake painting from Freeport in Oslo. To do this, they arrange a plane crash, but encounter an inverted masked man in an unusual room with a "turnstile".

The protagonist meets with Sator. He manages to gain confidence by offering to Rob a plutonium-241 convoy in Tallinn that was captured in Kiev. The theft is successful, but is interrupted by an inverted car in which Sator holds kat hostage. It turns out that Sator controls the" turnstiles " of inversion, with which he moves to the past and to the future. Sator tortures the Protagonist and shoots kat before the soldiers of the organization "Argument" intervene. The hero follows Sator through the" turnstile " of inversion into the past. The protagonist manages to save kat, but fails to prevent the theft of plutonium.

It turns out that plutonium is the missing component of the materialized formula for inverting the entire world, developed by a female scientist of the future. Realizing the danger of the formula, she sent the nine components of the formula far into the past, so that the opposing group could not use it in a world conflict. The components of the formula were located in nine member countries of the "nuclear club", which provided the most secure storage of each of them, but the collapse of the USSR led to a series of events, as a result of which the young Andrey Sator came into contact with the militant group of the future and received inverting technologies from it. Over time, the aged Sator gets all the components of the formula, and, being terminally ill with cancer, decides to use the formula to invert the entire planet, killing all living things. Sator plans to go back in time and commit suicide, thereby activating the "dead man's switch" that triggers weapons of mass destruction. The protagonist, Neil, and an injured kat return to the turnstile in Oslo after spending several days in inversion to heal Sator's injured wife. When the characters get to the past before the operation with the plane crash, it turns out that the disguised inverted man who attacked the Protagonist from the "turnstile" was himself.

Earlier in the past, Mahir takes kat to Satoru's yacht to prevent him from killing himself. At the same time, in the abandoned Russian city of Stalsk-12, with the participation of the heroes, a special operation is being launched with the extensive use of inversion technologies to neutralize Sator's weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, this operation was the cause of the explosion, which in 2 weeks Michael Crosby will inform the Protagonist. The operation occurs simultaneously in 2 time directions. Neil turns around in time to inform the Protagonist about the mined mine, but does not have time. When they reach the end of the mine, they find Sator's assistant named Volkov and the body of a man with a backpack. Kat distracts her husband, preventing him from committing suicide. In the end, she kills him, but the disaster does not happen, because the Protagonist and Neil neutralize Volkov in time. The protagonist notices a keychain on Neil's backpack, which he saw earlier on the body of the dead man. Neil reveals that it was the Protagonist who hired him years earlier, and this mission is the end of their long friendship.

In the last scene of the film, the hero kills Priya while saving kat. Before killing her, he tells her what he learned from Neil: that in the distant future, he will create the organization "Argument" and hire Neil to help himself in the past.