'The Odyssey' Is Christopher Nolan's Most Haunting Epic About Being Seen

More than halfway through The Odyssey, Matt Damon’s Odysseus is on the beach, hungry and tired, when the ground splits open in front of him, waves breaking close by. Out of the scorched sand climb dead soldiers, men Odysseus fought beside and lost years earlier, returned only to be seen and finally acknowledged. It’s one scene, but the whole film keeps returning to versions of it: a husband and a wife, a nymph and the man she won’t let leave, a father and the son who barely remembers him, each one waiting to be seen for what they are.

That moment has Homer’s fingerprints on it, though not from The Odyssey alone; the film also draws from the Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. Odysseus is the Greek king who devised the plan to hide soldiers inside a wooden horse, ending the decade-long war at Troy. He spends the next several years trying to sail home to Ithaca, only to be pulled repeatedly off course: by a cyclops, a witch who changes his crew into pigs, and a nymph who keeps him on her island until years begin to blur. Back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) holds off a hall of suitors who have moved into the palace and are eating through the family’s stores while they wait for her to give up and remarry. His son Telemachus (Tom Holland), still an infant when his father left for Troy, grows up fast enough to try to help him reclaim the palace.

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has put a version of this same ache on screen once before, in Interstellar, where a father in space watches his children grow up through a succession of video messages, each one arriving too late for him to answer. Telemachus doesn’t get messages here. Instead, he just has the absence—the absence of his father—and grows up around the shape of it. Nolan, who wrote and directed the adaptation himself, takes just under three hours to tell it.

The film turns on a broken promise instead of a monster. The trick with the horse works as more than a war tactic—a guest turning on the people who let him in—and everyone else in The Odyssey ends up committing some version of the same offense, on a smaller scale. It’s the kind of guilt Nolan sat with once before in Oppenheimer, about a man who spent the rest of his life answering for the weapon whose creation he helped lead. Here the invention is a gift instead of a weapon, and the reckoning takes years at sea instead of a hearing room. The suitors do it by camping in Penelope’s hall and refusing to go until she gives in. Calypso (Charlize Theron) insists she only kept Odysseus on her island because he wasn’t ready to leave, a kindness that also looks a lot like captivity. The characters call the code everyone keeps breaking Zeus’s Law. Once you notice it, you start noticing how much of this myth is about hospitality, and what people owe each other when one of them has all the power.

Damon plays Odysseus worn down rather than swaggering, a man who now has to live with everything his choices have cost him. Hathaway gets the strongest written role in the film and does the most with it. The best example is a quiet scene near the beginning, a conversation with Damon the night before he leaves for war that carries the weight of 20 years neither of them has lived yet. Samantha Morton plays Circe less like Homer’s seductress and more like a judge. She transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs, because she’s already come to expect greed from the soldiers who passed through before them, and Odysseus’s men do little to change her mind. Morton delivers her character’s logic with an earthy wickedness that makes her smaller role feel larger than it is.

Lupita Nyong'o takes on both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, finding weariness in Helen especially, a woman blamed for a war she never asked anyone to start in her name. As Athena, Zendaya moves in and out of Odysseus's journey the way a conscience does, showing up exactly when he needs reminding that someone's still watching him. Robert Pattinson's Antinous seems to enjoy every second he gets to be awful onscreen, while John Leguizamo, playing the loyal, blind swineherd Eumaeus, forms an entire relationship with Telemachus out of just a handful of scenes.

The Odyssey is the first movie ever shot entirely with IMAX 70 mm cameras, and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema uses that scale mostly to make the ocean seem enormous and Odysseus’s boat small against it. Percussion and synthesizers drive most of Ludwig Göransson’s score, and that suits a film more interested in what survival costs than in celebrating survival itself. The production, filmed across Greece, Morocco, Italy, Iceland, and Scotland, leans on practical effects wherever it can, and the seams never show. The cyclops, the storms, and the horse itself all feel physically there instead of stitched together after the fact, which is a big reason the spectacle is so easy to believe.

Nolan cast this myth the way it’s been told and retold for nearly 3,000 years: differently, depending on who’s doing it, and with a cast pulled from all over the world. The dialogue matches that same contemporary spirit, more clipped and plainspoken, closer to now than to the Bronze Age, and it takes a few minutes to adjust to hearing Homer’s characters talk that way. But once the adjustment happens, it stops pulling focus and starts sounding like Nolan’s way of keeping ancient grief within our reach. The violence gets a similar kind of restraint. It’s there, since Homer’s poem doesn’t shy away from it, but the worst of it tends to happen just outside the frame, left for the audience to picture on their own.

The final 45-minute stretch is where it all comes together. Damon and Hathaway anchor that stretch, turning Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion into a test of whether their loyalty can survive everything time and war have made of them. Their reunion unfolds alongside the final battle itself—a fight that’s thrilling to watch on its own and staged with the same intense care as the rest of the film. Holland’s earnestness and Pattinson’s gift for onscreen underhandedness both pay off in that same stretch. (How it all plays out isn’t mine to give away…)

Nolan doesn’t end this the way Homer did, and by the time he gets there, the choice feels inevitable. For nearly three hours, he’s moved toward the dilemma raised by those dead soldiers on the scorched sand: whether a home can survive the years of absence, grief, and violence carried back to it. His ending makes homecoming about more than arriving in Ithaca; it becomes the fragile hope that loyalty and tenderness might endure all that’s changed. For a filmmaker drawn to the folded time of Tenet, Inception’s dream logic, and the self-made systems of Memento, there’s something moving about Nolan stripping all that machinery away simply to ask whether, after all these years, someone can know exactly who you are—and all you did to make it home—and still love you.

The Odyssey is in theaters now.