10 Recent Movies With One AWFUL Subplot
6. Kat's Son - Tenet
Christopher Nolan's Tenet was unquestionably one of 2020's most talked-about movies, and also one of its most divisive.
As visually striking and intriguing as it was, Nolan's infamous inability to write compelling women sadly strikes once again with his primary female character, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki).
Kat's role in the story involves her trying to regain custody of her son (Laurie Shepherd) from her abusive, blackmailing husband Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). It's a pretty typical arc for a major Nolan character, albeit one bereft of any emotional import whatsoever.
The problem isn't so much that we know basically nothing about Kat's son - that didn't stop Cobb's (Leonardo DiCaprio) quest in Inception being emotionally gripping - but that almost no effort is made to establish Kat's desperate desire to get her son back.
Nolan shoves Kat into the generic, cliched "loving, protective mother" role as a boring default, yet without sufficient character development it just feels like a cold, empty archetype to accompany what the director's really interested in: the timey-wimey action sequences.