I’m pretty sure that if 2020 was any other year then people wouldn’t have received ‘Tenet’ so gratefully and nobody would talking about it any more because everyone would just have agreed that it made no sense and was really stupid, but thanks to the pandemic and no movies coming out it’s literally all we have to talk about for the foreseeable future, and I suppose that’s why this theory about Robert Pattinson’s character has come up.

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This is obviously going to contain spoilers for the movie and it’s dumb I even have to warn people given the title of this article, but that’s unfortunately the world we live in, even before the pandemic. Anyway, it turns out that people reckon that Robert Pattinson’s character Neil is actually Kat’s son Max, but all grown up because at the end he says that he’s known the Protagonist for years and they pair have a beautiful friendship.

Here’s how it breaks down, courtesy of NME, who also decided to highlight some of the counter arguments as well. Very kind of them:

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The theory doing the rounds suggests that Neil is actually a grown-up version of Max, the son of Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) and Kat (Elizabeth Debicki).

One big hint is the fact that Neil reveals to the Protagonist (John David Washington) that it was “the end of a beautiful friendship” and that a future version of the Protagonist actually recruited Neil for his mission.

One other reason (albeit slightly speculative) that fans think Pattinson’s character is Max comes from the fact that Max is short for Maximilien in one less-common spelling of the name – and if you take the last four letters and reverse them, you get Neil. There is also the ‘Britishness’ link between him and supposed mother Kat, such as the high fashion sense.

However, there are a few points that could discount the theory, namely the fact that Neil doesn’t seem to care much about Kat or have any significant interactions with her, which would seem strange, especially considering she is motivated by her son.

Neil also suggests he may not be from the future, telling the Protagonist: “You have a future in the past,” inferring that he has aged normally and not at a different rate due to traveling back through time as Max.

Sounds like they’re grasping at straws a bit there, but given that this is a Christopher Nolan movie and doesn’t really make sense anyway then anything is possible. I don’t think it’s going to heighten or lower my experience of the movie either way to be honest, but if you want to believe it then feel free.

Gotta give a shout out to NME for highlighting their Britishness and ‘sense of high fashion’ though. Feel like that’s an integral, well known and essential part of being from the UK in 2020.

For more of the same, check out this weird video of Tom Cruise going to see ‘Tenet’. Why the hell did he make that?