Tenet

Hey!

We live in a twilight world.

We live in a twilight world.

And there are no friends at dusk.

You've been made. This siege is a blind for them to vanish you.

But I established contact.

Bring you in or kill you.

You have two minutes. Make up your mind.

Where's the package?

Coat check.

Stay.

No friends at dusk, huh?

You'll do.

Get him to the rally point.

Swap clothes. The Ukrainians are expecting a passenger.

I've never seen encapsulation like this.

We don't know how old it is, but it's the real deal.

Did you have an out?

Service tunnel to the sewer.

Take this. Take him. Take his exit. I don't trust ours anymore.

Can you defuse that?

It's centrally synchronized. Are there more?

Covering their tracks.

- Taking out the audience? - They're just the cheap seats.

That's not our mission.

Mine now.

Walk away.

You don't have to kill these people.

That wasn't one of us.

I'll take the help.

Go, go, go.

A man can be trained to hold out for about 18 hours,

so your colleagues will be clear by 7:00.

He didn't last 18 minutes.

He didn't have anything to hide.

You were smuggling a nobody.

It's risky.

Or were you counting on this?

Death.

CIA issue.

Spare yourself, once they clear.

Almost 7:00.

Uh-oh.

It's running fast.

We have to put it back one hour.

Get it out!

Welcome to the afterlife.

You've been in a medically-induced coma

while we got you out of Ukraine and rebuilt your mouth.

The suicide pills are fake.

Why?

A test.

A test?

They pulled my teeth out.

Did my team get clear?

No.

Private Russians, we think.

Somebody talked.

Not you.

You chose to die instead of giving up your colleagues.

We all believe we'd run into the burning building.

But until we feel that heat, we can never know.

You do.

I resign.

You don't work for us. You're dead.

Your duty transcends national interests.

This is about survival.

Whose?

Everyone's.

There's a cold war, cold as ice.

To even know its true nature is to lose.

This is knowledge divided.

All I have for you is a gesture

in combination with a word.

"Tenet."

Use it carefully.

It'll open the right doors, but some of the wrong ones, too.

That's all they've told you?

That test you passed?

Not everybody does.

With a high-vis vest and a clipboard, you can get almost anywhere.

Almost.

An obscure tenet.

No small talk.

Nothing that might reveal who we are or what we do.

I thought I was here to find out what we do.

You're not here for "what," you're here for "how."

"What" is your department and not my business.

Well, to do what I do...

I need some idea of the threat we face.

As I understand it, we're trying to prevent World War III.

Nuclear holocaust?

No.

Something worse.

Aim it and pull the trigger.

It's empty.

Aim it.

Check the magazine.

How?

One of these bullets is like us, traveling forwards through time.

The other one's going backwards.

Can you tell which is which?

How about now?

It's inverted. Its entropy runs backwards.

So, to our eyes, its movement is reversed.

We think it's a type of inverse radiation triggered by nuclear fission.

You didn't make it?

No, we don't know how yet.

So, where'd it come from?

Someone's manufacturing them in the future.

They're streaming back at us.

Try it.

You have to have dropped it.

How can it move before I touch it?

From your point of view, you caught it.

But from the bullet's point of view, you dropped it.

But cause comes before effect.

No, that's just the way we see time.

Well, what about free will?

That bullet wouldn't have moved if you hadn't put your hand there.

Either way we run the tape, you made it happen.

Don't try to understand it.

Feel it.

Instinct.

Got it.

Why does it feel so strange?

You're not shooting the bullet,

you're catching it.

Whoa.

I've seen this type of ammunition before.

In the field?

I was almost hit.

Then you were exceedingly lucky.

An inverted bullet passing through your body would be devastating.

Not pretty.

These look like today's.

They may have been made today and inverted years from now.

Where did you get them?

Came with the wall. I was assigned it, like all the material I'm studying here.

Do you have an analysis on the metals?

Sure. Why?

The mixture of alloys can tell me where they might have been made.

Look...

I'm not seeing Armageddon here.

The bullet may not seem like much, but it's a simple machine.

Lead bullet, brass casing, gunpowder.

If they can invert that,

I see no reason they couldn't invert pretty much anything.

Even a nuclear weapon can only affect our future.

An inverted weapon might be able to affect our past as well.

Now that we know what to look for, we're finding more and more inverted material.

Remnants of complex objects.

What do you think we're seeing?

The detritus of a coming war.

- Yep? - We live in a twilight world.

No friends at dusk. I was told you left the building.

Even the dead need allies.

Specifically?

I need an assist in Mumbai. I need to get to Sanjay Singh.

Singh?

He never leaves his house. And his house is...

- his house. - Yes, it is.

I'm looking right at it.

I'll see who's on deck.

Bombay Yacht Club in two hours.

It seems you need an introduction

to a prominent Mumbai local on short notice.

I'm Neil.

I need an audience with Sanjay Singh.

That's not possible.

Ten minutes tops.

Time isn't the problem.

It's getting out alive that's the problem.

Would you take a child hostage? A woman?

If I had to.

I'm not looking to make much noise here.

Yes?

Vodka tonic. And a Diet Coke.

What?

You never drink on the job.

You're well-informed.

Well, pays to be in our profession.

Well, I prefer soda water.

No, you don't.

How's your parachuting?

I broke an ankle during basic training.

Singh's house isn't tall enough to parachute off of.

It's bungee-jump able.

I don't think "bungee-jump able" is a word.

It may not be a word, but it may be our only way out of that place.

Or into it, for that matter.

I know you're tired. I'm also very tired.

Stay back.

I was almost taken out by a very unusual type of ammunition in Ukraine.

I want to know who supplied it.

My name is Sanjay.

And you are?

No chitchat?

There's no one at the other end. No one who's gonna help you, anyway.

Don't let it get cold.