Beyond Nolan: 7 directors who bent time in daring, emotional ways

Time as a concept has been an interesting topic for many directors to deal with and famously so for The Odyssey director Christopher Nolan. While The Odyssey itself does not bring in, structurally, the narrative or thematic spotlight on this concept, the passage of time during Odysseus' journey on the sea after the Trojan war becomes an integral point of discussion and enabler for the film's plot. With this film now becoming the highest grossing R-rated film of all time, it is but impossible to turn a blind eye to the impacts his films have had on the audiences. His other works like Inception and Interstellar more famously use this concept to significantly alter the films' characters life and have always become many cinephile's topic of discussions and breakdowns.

While most of the discourse about the use of time in a film's concept is reserved for this modern master filmmaker, other vital, more diverse works of many directors are often overlooked. So Indulge dives into listing seven incredible contemporary directors and spolights their works that deal with time in the most fascinating ways.

The man behind the hit Dune film series is a celebrated not just for the way he crafts his films but also the deep dive he gets into with his film's characters and themes. WIth his film Arrival we see how he treats time as a mode of communication that characters use to overwhelm us with emotions. Merging past, present and future as a whole we as the audience are mesmerised when we learn of how the timeline's happenings and its implications on the lead character are all experienced at the same time.

Richard Linklater lends time a humanly touch. In both Boyhood and The Before Triology characters experience time as the friend that helps ease their pain and eventually evolving to become a mirror for their personalities, further lending a human, emotional narrative weight to their journey.

Sriram Raghavan is an underrated contemporary film master whose touch with non-linear narratives and neo-noir flair just oozes perfection. Be it the hilariously haunting reveals of Andhadhun the truths within which act as markers of the passage of time within the story or his more recent mystery thriller Merry Christmas that adds an emotional weight to the 'when' of it all, time is of the essence in his films.

When watching a Payal Kapadia film, time often feels like spectral and archival element which is captured in the most visceral, poetic manner but while maintaining all the realism in it. The recursive and frozen nature of the stories progression often brings out a burst of emotions that were witheld across the timeline. All We Imagine As Light contrasts the two different locations as the canvas upon which time captures reality.

In Aparna Sen's films time has often become the prison or room of comfort for characters, depend on which character you ask. 36 Chowringhee Lane has Jennifer Kendal's Violet Stoneham's past often shadowing her present. 15 Park Avenue on the other hand uses time as a cursor that shakes up Meethi's (Konkona Sen Sharma) reality as someone suffering from schizophrenia. Goynar Baksho is another project that highlights Aparna Sen's masterful take on time using a singular MacGuffin as a vessel to present the different periods and how they impact the story.

Vetrimaaran's staging of time in Vada Chennai needs to be studied! An element that constantly haunts the younger generations and reels in veiwers deeper into its lore is the time-jumps across the story. This treatment of the story highlights the generational impacts that a time period and its everlasting, impending events have.

Maharaja starring Vijay Sethupathi, became one of the highest-grossing Tamil films of 2024. And with anyone who has seen the film, the reson for its resoance will remain to be the way the story has been told. The big twists that are peppered across the story have an amplified impact on the viewers' consciousness largely due to the treatment of time in the plot. Right from the grudge that Maharaja holds with the past to Selvam's choices that have an haunting bearing on him, the film showed how time can both heal wounds and deepen them simultaneously.