So you sat through three hours of a ‘loyal husband’ crying across the Aegean Sea, trying to return to his wife? Me too. But here’s the truth: the Odysseus Homer wrote about stayed loyal for roughly two out of the ten years he spent on his way back home. And the two women Nolan’s Odyssey demotes to mere seductresses and obstacles in his journey, Circe and Calypso, were in fact his lovers in the epic.
He stays with Circe for a year on Aeaea and with Calypso on Ogygia. And the fact that he was involved with them is made explicit in the nearly three-millennia-old epic, even though none of this made it to our IMAX screens. This is deliberate, because would we get as dewy-eyed over a hero whose wife back home in Ithaca bears the sole responsibility for monogamy, fending off suitors by weaving an infinite loom?
In whitewashing Odysseus, Nolan fails the women whom the adaptation could have celebrated instead: Penelope, Calypso, and, most of all, Circe, the witch who has fascinated me as a Greek mythology buff to this day.
Why Circe felt like a complete stranger
I will, without embarrassment, admit that my obsession with Greek mythology started with reading Percy Jackson as a child. Numerous re-readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey followed in adulthood. But my interest in Circe was piqued, obviously, by Madeline Miller’s 2018 retelling, Circe. In the epic, Homer introduces her as ‘Circe, goddess of the lovely hair’ — and she has captured painters’ imaginations in various time periods since.
Over three thousand years, she has been imagined as a counsellor in Angelica Kauffman’s Ulysses and Circe (1786), a femme fatale in John Collier’s Circe (1885), and a regal hostess in John William Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus (1891). She is dressed in luxurious gauze drapes, wine in one hand and a sword in the other; she sits on an ornate throne with lions and wolves at her feet. A queen of her own world in the wilderness.
That’s the image of Circe that a blend of history and mythology has handed me. So pardon me for being massively unimpressed when she is reduced to a witch living in a hut in a gloomy wasteland, miserable and with a cauldron, however much the movie tries to sell this as a way of thickening the plot.
However, credit where it’s due: it is an iconic scene when Circe offers a meal to Odysseus’s men. They start eating out of desperation, only to slowly begin force-feeding and gagging as the soup surges back up their throats. She watches at first, then closes in as if to stroke them before clutching their faces like an aggressive potter disfiguring a piece of clay.
Their faces contort beneath her hands, reshaped without grace. Her hand goes straight into their throats as she moulds their features with her fingers, while wails and tufts of hair spurt from their ears. Their skin changes, their eyes water as if they might be gouged out, and suddenly their screams weaken into dull oinks.
The man sitting next to me in the theatre flinched. Which I assume was the goal.
However, is turning men into pigs really the height of Circe’s character? Homer does not shy away from depicting Odysseus’s helplessness when he washes up on her shore and portrays her as far more than a pitstop or a villain. She becomes one of the most powerful allies Odysseus encounters, offering both vital advice and practical aid. He calls her ‘the awe-inspiring goddess who speaks like a human’.
Her hospitality, her palace, food, wine, music, and generosity replenish a crew of 45 surviving men for over a year. Her magic and foresight provide Odysseus with a foolproof manual for returning alive from the Underworld and surviving the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis on his way home.
The problem beyond Circe
Unfortunately, this is the pattern across the film. Circe, Penelope, Calypso, and even Athena do not get any emotional texture or inner life of their own. They mostly come and go to push Odysseus’s sob story forward. Regardless of their importance in the actual epic, they get little screen time beyond responding to his cries for help.
It’s worth noting that Emily Wilson, the classicist whose acclaimed translation of the Odyssey reportedly shaped the film, has written about the poem in far more clear-eyed terms, describing it in a New Yorker essay as ‘A complex and truthful articulation of gender dynamics that continue to haunt us.’
Her reading foregrounds how the poem quietly reveals male anxieties over women’s power, and how women are hemmed in and silenced by the world around them. Nolan’s film gestures towards that idea but ultimately folds it back into Odysseus’s guilt and homecoming, leaving the women as supporting characters in his psychological arc.
It’s worth noting that Emily Wilson, the classicist whose acclaimed translation of the Odyssey reportedly shaped the film, has written about the poem in far more clear-eyed terms, describing it in a New Yorker essay as ‘A complex and truthful articulation of gender dynamics that continue to haunt us.’
But this isn’t about one Oscar-winning director’s ‘masterpiece’. It’s about how Greek mythology has never been a sanitised bedtime story with a happy ending. Reading the Iliad, for instance, still leaves me cold.
Even though much of early Greek mythology is written in poetic verse, that doesn’t change the difficult themes that it discusses. For instance, the fact that Zeus morphed into a swan to rape Leda, the trauma and consequences of which eventually lead to the Trojan War; when Poseidon assaults Medusa inside Athena’s own temple, and Athena punishes Medusa by divine decree instead of the perpetrator; when Persephone is kidnapped by Hades and dragged into the Underworld; or when Daphne has to literally turn into a tree to escape Apollo’s pursuit.
The lines between women’s consent, agency, and male sexual entitlement are constantly intersecting in these stories, which are soaked in bloodshed and ultimately reflect the kind of gendered power imbalance we still grapple with in our society today. Then the least we can do in 2026 is not cherry-pick parts of a classic and conceal its bitter core.
About the author(s)
Harshala makes decks for a living and consumes stories for survival. A content and brand strategist at SOCIAL, she comes from a background in advertising and copywriting and has a habit of going slightly off brief. She's interested in queer stories, internet culture, and the ways people make meaning of the world around them. She is also the author of The Boy in the Cupboard, a tender and imaginative picture book.
