Remember Tenet? I don’t — I have some vague memory of walking into a movie theater and wondering why the sound mixing was so bad, but if you ask me any details about the plot or say anything beyond “backwards guy looks cool,” my mind will draw a complete blank.


Thankfully, I’m not alone in this experience. One Forbes writer looked at Google Trends and claimed that the film was the “most confusing movie ever,” and to this day, any online discussion helmed by someone who loves the movie begins with a thorough attempt at trying to explain its convoluted plot.


In my case, Tenet merely slipped into the back of my mind. However, some people felt more passionate about the movie and were able to share their thoughts to the director himself — though not in the way you might expect.


Recently, Christopher Nolan accepted a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director for his work on Oppenheimer. During his acceptance speech, he recounted an experience when he was doing a Peloton class and the instructor, in so many words, told him that Tenet was terrible. The moment begins at the one-minute mark.



I’ve never done a Peloton class before, so I have no idea how much of one’s workout is usually filled with film analysis. In this case, however, someone was able to find the clip in which the Peloton instructor talks about the film, and boy, is she brutal.


In the clip, the instructor says that the song that the group is listening to is from Tenet. She then goes on to share her thoughts about the film, saying that it’s “two and a half hours of my life that I want back.”



“Anybody see this shit?” she asks about the movie. “Did anybody see this besides me? Because I need a manual. Someone’s gotta explain this. What the fuck was going on in that movie? Do you understand? Seriously, you need to be a neuroscientist to understand.”


Now, I’m not sure there’s really anything *to* understand about the movie. You could give me a thousand hours locked in a room with the Blu-ray, and I’m still not sure I’d be able to tell you any of the specifics about the final battle besides “it looked cool.” Regardless, X/Twitter users appreciated the Peloton instructor’s outspokenness.





Nolan doesn’t say if this helped or hindered his workout, but word got back to the instructor, Jenn Sherman, that he made this comment. It turns out, she enjoyed his other work. “I may not have understood a minute of what the hell was going on in Tenet,” Sherman said in an Instagram reel. “But I have seen Oppenheimer twice, and that’s six hours of my life that I don’t ever want to give back.”


She followed it up by offering Nolan a front-row seat for any of her Peloton classes, just in case he wants to be humiliated in person. Who knows? Maybe she has some thoughts on the ending of Interstellar that will make Nolan shredded.