Christianity Today July 27, 2026 8 min signal 2026-07-27

Christopher Nolan's dark night of the soul

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Christianity Today

July 27, 2026

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Gilbert Flores / Contributor / Getty / Edits by CT

If Christopher Nolan knows how to do one thing, it’s to make films that feel important. The rare contemporary director whose movies are sold by his name alone, he champions the theatrical experience and all its old-school techniques—location shoots, practical effects, ensemble casts, years-long productions—that his peers have neither the stomach nor the bankroll to embrace.

I’m a fan. Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) was one of the first blockbusters to draw me back for multiple showings. Inception (2010) hooked me on moviegoing for life. If a new release has his name on it, I’m there—no questions asked.

The Odyssey, Nolan’s latest epic based on Homer’s ancient poem, certainly meets expectations from a technical standpoint. It is expansive and immersive, putting us inside castle walls, swaying ships, the belly of the Trojan horse. Hollywood is better off celebrating the buzz and box office success of such earnest artistry than any of the thin, sloppy, overly digitized retreads and spinoffs that get cranked out on the regular.

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But is Nolan, the great storyteller, getting any closer to the greatest story of all?

Befitting its name, The Odyssey is much more effective as a journey than an arrival. It works wonders as a wild ride from one cursed island to another, but it doesn’t have as much to say when the ship finally comes to a halt—except that war is hell and everything else is, essentially, vapor. It’s the latest sign that Nolan’s filmography is moving further from hope and closer to Ecclesiastes resignation.

Even his best films have often drawn the same critique: Nolan is better at building worlds, distorting timelines, mastering the mechanics of a story than portraying a human heart. He is, like his warring magicians in The Prestige (2006), a showman to his core—more illusionist than prophet. But a stretch of his epics once hinted that he was inching toward the transcendent, if not an overt reconciliation with his Catholic school upbringing.

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Heath Ledger’s Joker may have carried The Dark Knight with intoxicating evil, but Nolan still nodded to the goodness of sacrifice in his famed Batman trilogy. The people disappoint the Joker because they won’t resort to his anarchy. Bane can’t sustain his Gotham revolt in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) because Bruce Wayne breaks his back and risks his life for the city, inspiring kids, police, and would-be burglars in the process. Maybe Nolan was always boxed in here; he had to side with Batman. But he still took great pains to include resurrection-like glory for his complicated crusader, famously closing the third film with a pulse-pounding surprise. Batman, thought to be dead, lives on in secrecy. He can’t be lost.

Interstellar (2014) is even more enamored with the power of sacrifice and compassionate longing. Matthew McConaughey’s astronaut loses years of his earthly life to find a hospitable planet for humanity. Nolan uses arguably the most emotional twist of his career to advance a theory posited by a fellow traveler: Love “isn’t something we invented,” but it’s so powerful it transcends even time and space. No explicit mention of God. But a nod.

Dunkirk (2017) moves the journey to the beaches of war but contains the same ingredients: a “desperation to get home” drawn from Homer’s Odyssey, as Nolan told biographer Tom Shone, and an ultimate sign of hope—this time in the form of civilian rescue boats.

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You can sense Nolan building his next film at almost every step. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) must traverse dreams as a criminal in Inception before Cooper (McConaughey) can traverse skies in Interstellar—both men ultimately desiring reunion with their families. Spaceships must pass through black holes before bullets can be “inverted” in Tenet (2020), and that movie’s madmen must threaten to destroy the world before a real-life physicist can agonize over blowing it up in Oppenheimer (2023).

Nolan has spoken openly about pulling at some of the same threads from different angles, describing his films as “working out your fascinations in public” and “driving at your own obsessions cinematically,” as documented in The Nolan Variations. It’s clear he’s always been fascinated by the constructs of the world, how they can be stretched and rearranged. He’s always asking, be it in space, in dreams, or at sea, What is our fate? What is our role? And can we truly change course?

But where his answers once tipped toward biblical virtues like hope and sacrifice, he now seems inclined to give more weight to humanity’s destructive tendencies and empty pursuits.

Tenet hints, inside its nearly undecipherable structure, that a Protagonist (John David Washington) can still make a difference in the machinery of time—maybe. Oppenheimer is far more cautionary, infused with some of Nolan’s most graphic depictions of sin and ending on an apocalyptic note. The Odyssey is like a spiritual sister to that biopic, more accessible but also painting its central figure, Odysseus (Matt Damon), less like an inspired hero and more like a gifted leader who left countless bodies in the wake of his military mission. Nolan’s leading men are growing increasingly conflicted, wayward, and without clear paths to redemption.

“Everything is meaningless” and “those who exalt themselves will be humbled” are of course just as biblical as “love your neighbor.” Those who live by the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). So perhaps Nolan isn’t straying—so much as a secular storyteller can stray—but rather allowing his personal quest for truth to swing in the other direction. He’s had his fun with heroes, and now he’s into the grimy, complicated depravity of humankind that begs for salvation.

Nolan almost seems destined to arrive at religious texts. Still, he’s apparently not quite ready to concede there’s a higher power worth pursuing in earnest. His Odyssey, though inclusive of giants and witches and other mythological shocks, uses Greek legend more like an obligatory backdrop than a meaningful part of Odysseus’ calling. The gods are present, but Nolan is more interested in depicting the cost of human soldiering than divine direction. “Zeus’ law,” a variation of the Golden Rule and Jesus’ teaching on the least of these (Matthew 25:40-45), gets a lot of lip service but hardly any demonstration.

That doesn’t mean Nolan’s made a bad movie. It just means he’s working hard (again) to ask similar questions, straining to build bigger worlds, grander spectacles, Hollywood-buoying tentpoles that once gestured toward a great beyond and now seem a bit weary.

The vengeful finale of The Odyssey, though mostly faithful to Homer’s text, feels handcuffed to the theme—humanity is destined for destruction—resulting in an empty kind of ride into the sunset. Yes, lurking suitors who invade Odysseus’ home reap what they sow, but the film’s last bout of bloodshed feels oddly regressive after a stronger, more stirring earlier sequence, which transforms the Greeks’ ambush at Troy—first shown as a tactical marvel—into a moment of mourning.

This, I’d argue, is where Nolan gets closest to a Christian revelation, when Athena (Zendaya), the quiet god who appears by Odysseus’s side, is suddenly revealed as just another symbol for all he has mercilessly torn down. If only Nolan’s tortured arrow slinger could adopt her submission.

It’s ironic—or maybe just intentional—that all The Odyssey’s best sequences depict the horrors of endless pursuit. Why settle for one sheep when a Cyclops’s cave houses a herd of them? Why not slurp down stew from the cauldrons of an oddly lonesome lady? Why not weather vicious lightning storms if it means a bite of fresh cattle?

Every “victory” of Odysseus’ voyage is also a violation, and all those lost along the way are left to lament in murky black death, including a great armored general who parades home to be slain in his own bed. It’s almost like the trying itself—the refusal to be settled, the worship of the journey, the absence of a guiding light—is the problem.

Maybe Christopher Nolan can sense it himself, this cinematic odyssey in which he keeps trying to scratch that “delicious itch” that can’t be reached. Maybe Damon’s Odysseus is a stand-in for the director in arguably the most moving scene of the film, when the bearded wanderer orders his men to tie him to the mast of his ship as the alluring but lethal Siren song fills his ears. He’s desperate to taste of otherworldly goodness and knowledge without also losing his life to it. It is an act of half submission as he seeks to have it both ways—a clever idea with an agonizing price.

Cody Benjamin is a senior news writer at Christianity Today.

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