Tenet: 10 Reasons It's Christopher Nolan's Worst Film Ever
8. Kat Is A One-Note, Passive Female Character
A recurring criticism of Christopher Nolan's work has been poorly-written female characters. This doesn't necessarily apply to all of his films - for example, Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes and Maggie Gyllenhaal) in The Dark Knight Trilogy and Mal (Marion Cotillard) and Ariadne (Ellen Page) in Inception are exceptions - but this has been a problem with some of his other movies. The Prestige, Interstellar and now, Tenet, are perhaps the biggest offenders.
Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), the abused wife of main antagonist Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), is easily one of the worst examples of this problem yet. Although Elizabeth Debicki is very good (as you'd expect), Kat is a poorly-written female lead and an inactive victim for most of the film's run-time.
To be honest, she feels more like a plot prop than a character, as she's mainly a way for the Protagonist to get closer to Sator. She's also made harder to like by the fact that she makes an astonishingly stupid decision in the final act which nearly dooms all of the characters. The highly talented Debicki really did deserve better.