The Dunkirk in the title of this weekend’s editor’s note refers to Christopher Nolan’s new film, and not to the coastal town in France. Though I suppose in some sense there is no difference.

Dunkirk is Dunkirk.

Nolan’s latest really is quite a remarkable film. The kind of film that I expect will play on my mind over and over, in different ways, over the days and months to come. There are some films that do this. They say a particular set of things to you as you walk out of the movie hall, and then different things the next morning, and different-er things yet a few months or years later. Nolan is particularly good, I feel, at this sort of thing. He seems to have a knack for the right combination of storytelling attributes—technical, narrative, emotional—that is perhaps needed to pull off this kind of interpretive density out of films.

I am perhaps one of only 10 people on this entire planet who unreservedly enjoyed Interstellar. I have seen it once in an IMAX theatre and then many times again on the TV screen. Each time I enjoy it a little better, a little differently, a little more confoundingly. Many people found the science convoluted. I thought the science itself was almost secondary to the many other themes of the film: treachery, hope, betrayal but most of all abandonment. Every significant character in the film commits an act of abandonment. Starting from the missing mother.

Ultimately the movie ends with humans abandoning Earth.

Dunkirk is ostensibly a film, told in three stories, about the British naval operation to rescue hundreds of thousands of soldiers squeezed onto a beachhead in France by the German military juggernaut in the opening few months of World War II. It is one of the great turning points of the war and, consequently, perhaps one of the great turning points in world history.

Nolan’s Dunkirk is so tense, so tight, so chaotic, so frenetic, that it is climactic from start to finish. This film is really one long ending of a film. It is like Nolan has decided to film only the last episode of a five-part series on Dunkirk. The BBC’s great Mark Kermode, whose review went online just as I walked out of the multiplex, pointed out a remarkable act of sleight of hand (ear?) that takes place very early on in the film.

As the camera pans over the soldiers assembled on the beach, you hear a ticking sound in the background. This sound rises and rises and rises. You expect something to happen. Perhaps it will be the predictable—a strafing German fighter swooping over the beach. Perhaps it will be something miraculous—a huge fleet of ships ready to pick up the wretched.

But in fact nothing happens. The ticking reaches a crescendo and then melds into the soundtrack. You are agitated into a state of great tension. And then left there. Tension, Nolan told the BBC in a radio interview, was what this movie was all about. And tension runs through this film like cardamom through a fine payasam. It permeates everything from Hoyte von Hoytema’s superb camerawork to Hans Zimmer’s truly epic soundtrack.

Indeed in some sense this is triptych built on a triptych: a three-part story built on a tri-axial superstructure of story, music and sight.

Also, while Dunkirk is tension distilled, this is unmistakably a film about decency. Not courage, cowardice, faith, honour, evil or any of the other things that propel most good and bad war films, but basic human decency. All the characters in this movie are fundamentally decent, even if they continuously have their sense of decency challenged and stretched. Sometimes their decency falters, but time and time again they stay fast. Even if they walk into the sea and give up their lives.

This is perhaps why the source of all that is indecent in the context of the film—the Germans—are represented only by their planes and the sound of their bullets. Not a single German face appears on screen. Nolan has no time for that. This is a film about decency.

The dialogue is the only part of the film that can’t cope with the rest of its mastery. But there is very little of it.

I am afraid much of the discussion surrounding Dunkirk will be of a comparative nature. Is it Nolan’s best? Worst? Because this is 2017 and we are no longer allowed to enjoy a thing for what it is.

I enjoyed it very much indeed. And you will do too. Do the decent thing. Book a ticket.

Letter From... is Mint on Sunday’s antidote to boring editor’s columns. Each week, one of our editors—Sidin Vadukut in London and Arun Janardhan in Mumbai—will send dispatches on places, people and institutions that are worth ruminating about on the weekend.

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