It’s been a few months since Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hit cinemas, but my husband said something interesting that stuck with me when we emerged from our local screening: “Nolan really likes exploring the idea of lost time.”

When I asked what he meant, he mentioned the wave planet sequence in Interstellar – which is coincidentally one of my all time favourite scenes and inspired elements of my own novel – as well as the film Inception. I realised he was right: both movies really do play with the emotional fallout of losing time, this idea that you might waste swathes of your life you can never reclaim and how you do or don’t come to terms with that.

This made me curious how many of Christopher Nolan’s films play with this idea, so I had a look at his filmography. I found six worth taking a look at.

** SPOILER WARNING: this post discusses key plot twists for several of the mentioned films **

The Odyssey (2026)

The Odyssey centres the theme of lost time, but what I found so interesting was that it made me realise how little the time scales in the original myth had previously hit home for me. The ten years spent at war in Troy, and Odysseus’s twenty years away, always felt like arbitrary literary embellishments, the same way fairy tale plot points come in threes. Time is compacted into a neat narrative sequence of key moments where we skip to the good bits: the cyclops, the sirens, etc. Yet in this film, you’re made to feel the emotional burden of those years, not just in the gruelling length of the war, but in what is missed by Odysseus and those who love him in the interim, and in how it changes everyone. By the end, you understand the sheer “odyssey” he’s had to endure, and the things he will never get back.

Tenet (2020)

I’d forgotten this was a Nolan film, but I smiled when I saw it in his filmography, realising just how deep the theme of time goes for him. However, even though the plot of Tenet is almost solely focused on time, it doesn’t really explore the haunting spectre of lost time. The film centres on secretive agencies with the ability to move backwards through time or “invert”. It’s a fantastic story, but it’s more about dramatic action scenes, complex overlapping timelines, and saving the world, than it is about individuals emotionally grappling with missing time they’ll never reclaim.

Interstellar (2014)

In the wave planet sequence of Interstellar, the time warping effect of a gravitational field causes many years to pass for one character left on the ship while only minutes pass for the characters who visit the planet. I remember the chills I felt in that moment when they returned and I realised he’d spent twenty-three years of his life alone, ageing, waiting for friends who might never return. The peril the other characters endured down on the planet felt like nothing compared to the sheer magnitude of all that time lost. That sequence has stayed with me for years, and I think it’s in part for exactly that reason. It explores the tragedy of lost time, and how short our lives can feel in the grand scales of the universe.

Inception (2010)

In Inception, the exploration of lost time is more abstract than others on this list. As the characters deliberately descend into layers of dreams within dreams within dreams, we learn that the deeper you descend, the slower time passes, so that if you go deep enough, what feels like years might only be mere minutes in reality. And if you get lost in limbo, you can be stuck in the dream world forever with no sense of time or reality. People are at risk of dreaming their whole life away, or, as we come to understand from the tragic backstory of the main character and his wife, no longer knowing what is real.

The Prestige (2006)

Again, I’m revealing a major spoiler here, as it seems many of the twists in these films hinge on the haunting reveal of time lost, so be warned… but in The Prestige, we learn that both magicians have made great sacrifices in trying to outdo one another. For Christian Bale’s character, this entails living only half a life, having to share time with his twin brother, including time spent with family, and hide away for the rest of it so as not to risk revealing they are twins. This takes a toll, though I would argue not quite the same toll as what Hugh Jackman’s character chooses to do. His sacrifice is not really about lost time, but it still gives me chills thinking about it.

Memento (2000)

Memento was Nolan’s breakout success, based on a short story written by his brother Jonathan Nolan, and it really sets the stage for his penchant for playing with time. The narrative unfolds both forwards and in reverse, alternating toward one central moment and giving us a taste of what it is like to experience the protagonist’s anterograde amnesia, an inability to store long term memory. And in the big twist, we learn that more time has passed for the character than he initially realises, and has in a way been “stolen” from him by someone who used his goal of avenging his wife’s murder to their own ends. Yet interestingly, in the end, our main character becomes a willing participant in his own delusion, more eager to deny a painful reality than to see the truth.

Why is the idea of losing time so compelling?

Nolan films are of course not the only stories that play with the idea of lost time. In writing this post, I was also reminded of the science fiction novel The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez, which opens with a farmer on a supply planet who falls in love with the captain of an interstellar transport and endures years of yearning between her visits, while for her little time passes. I was also reminded, funnily enough, of Adam Sandler’s Click, which gets unexpectedly deep and emotional when a man accidentally fast-forwards through most of his life.

I think it’s ultimately unsurprising that this theme comes up so often and is compelling not just to Nolan but to other storytellers. It taps into a deep human fear, and perhaps also a longing. As mortal beings, we all have limited time available to us, and the idea that we might waste it, or have it suddenly stolen away, or that we might only get to spend fleeting moments of it with the ones we love, can be terrifying. We also long for a life “well lived”, hoping we’ll make the most of it and get to spend as much time with those we care about, or doing the things that matter to us, as we can.

Perhaps it’s not a stretch to say that many stories that use conceits like time travel and alternate realities – stories like About Time, The Midnight Library, and even the book I’m reading at the moment, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – play with this same fear of regret and longing for fulfilment. And whether they show us our worst fears, or give us uplifting stories of hope, they all remind us to think about, as Gandalf would say, “what to do with the time that is given to us.”

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Are there any other Nolan films I missed that also explore the idea of lost time? Or do you have any favourite stories, Nolan or otherwise, that use this theme? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.