Tenet (stylized in all caps, previously as TENƎꓕ) is a 2020 science fiction action film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife, Emma Thomas. It stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh. The film follows a CIA officer 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 by the future. Nolan took over five years to write the screenplay after deliberating about Tenet's central ideas for more than a decade.