There is a moment in Christopher Nolan's new film when Odysseus — played by Matt Damon, his boyish face reshaped into a careworn mask of grief — tells his wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, that the war he is about to fight has nothing to do with honour or love. The abduction of Helen, he confesses quietly, is a convenient story; the real cause is a banal commercial dispute over trading routes. It is the kind of admission that reframes everything that follows, and Nolan, who has always been drawn to the gap between official narrative and private truth, builds his entire epic around that fault line. The film reconstructs the Odyssey not as a tale of heroic adventure but as an origin myth of postwar disillusion, presided over by capricious gods who intervene on almost equal terms with the humans they torment.

Odysseus's long journey home is rendered as an invisible odyssey of psychological anguish — punctuated by hallucinations, violent flashbacks, and confrontations with what the film treats as the arbitrary deities of dysfunction. It speaks, with remarkable directness, to what we now call PTSD: the recognition that many soldiers return in body long before they return in spirit, if they return in spirit at all. Back in Ithaca, Penelope and their child are suspended in a kind of living grief, unable to move forward through no fault of their own. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema fills the IMAX frame with landscapes of loneliness that feel genuinely vast, deliberately draining the sea of its postcard blues, while Hans Zimmer's drums throb beneath battle sequences of considerable ferocity.

Benny Safdie, as Agamemnon, wears a strange Batman-like helmet throughout, his face almost never visible — a detail that feels both unsettling and precisely right. The Trojan Horse itself is reimagined as something between the Statue of Liberty and Shelley's Ozymandias: a crumbling idol, dragged inside the city walls not as a gift delivered on casters, but as a half-buried object salvaged from the surf by the very people it will destroy. What lingers, though, is the cost paid by one man to make the deception work. Odysseus must betray his own cousin Sinon, played by Elliot Page, in what the film frames as a blood sacrifice for which no victory can ever fully atone.