The Universal Theory directed by Timm Kröger is a stunning homage to all those black-and-white film-noir mysteries of the 1940s with a dreamlike sci-fi twist.
Quantum Noir
by Alexa DalbyThe Universal Theory
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
CAUTION: Here be spoilers
One reviewer described this as ‘high pastiche’. Stunning and intriguing, this description of The Universal Theory certainly is accurate. In fact, there are two pastiches in this film: a naff 1970s chat show with Johannes as guest and, for the main film, with its own titles like a film within a film – grainy black-and-white footage purportedly from 1962. Both are really excellent – as far as they go.
The principal character of the main story is Johannes (a wonderful performance from Jan Bülow), an immature German PhD student writing a reality-bending dissertation about the existence of other dimensions – ‘The Universal Theory’. He accompanies his dour doctoral supervisor Dr Strathen (Hanns Zischler) by train from Munich to a quantum physics convention at a hotel high up in the Swiss Alps. Another physicist Professor Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss), a drunken extrovert, joins them, but although everyone is assembled, the conference is cancelled when the keynote speaker does not arrive. While in the Alpine hotel, Johannes has a brief affair with mysterious French-speaking Karin (Olivia Ross), the hotel’s jazz pianist, which he can never recapture or forget, even years later, when he still tries to find her.
What and who are real, and what and who exist in another dimension, as prefigured by Johannes’ dissertation? That’s the enigma when other dimensions co-exist in this modern and futuristic cinematic sci-fi homage to Hitchcock, Orson Welles’ The Third Man and 1940s films noirs – it looks authentic, with spies, possibly crooked police, a femme fatale and retro skiers all in the Alps, a bit like Wes Anderson’s snow-bound The Grand Budapest Hotel.
It’s amazing, absorbing, dreamlike, much too long, cleverly done and it enjoys the journey rather than the destination. The Bernard Herrmann-type orchestral music does a lot of heavy lifting plot-wise. This physics conundrum on film suddenly comes to an unclear end, but it’s still audacious and marvellous.
Note to director and former cinematographer Timm Kröger, re international sales: white subtitles, even retro ones, against a background of snow (even the breathtaking backdrop of the Swiss mountains) are not readable, so non-German-speaking viewers may miss some of the dialogue.
The Universal Theory premiered in Venice and is released on 13 December 2024 in the UK.
