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The effect of anisotropy and spatial dispersion of a metamaterial on the Talbot effect may be engineered in principle. This has profound implications for applications of the Talbot effect such as the design of a multimode interference coupler (MMI). The paper describes how a metamaterial can suppress the modal phase error which otherwise limits the scaling of MMI port dimension. A binary multilayer dielectric material described by the Kronig–Penney model is shown to provide a close approximation to the required dispersion relation. Results of simulations of a multi-slotted waveguide MMI engineered to provide a polarising beam splitter function are given as an example of the method.