04/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Timm Kröger’s sci-fi thriller is mysterious – so mysterious that you might even struggle to understand what it’s actually about

Timm Kröger’s latest feature, The Universal Theory [+see also:
trailer
interview: Timm Kröger
film profile], has world-premiered in the main competition of this year’s Venice Film Festival. The film opens with a recording of a 1970s TV broadcast in which the protagonist, writer and former scientist Johannes Leinert (Jan Bülow), tries to convince the guests and the audience that what he wrote in his novel Die Theorie von Allem (lit. "The Theory of Everything") isn’t fiction, but is actually based on true events and some real discoveries on the so-called multiverse. The presenter doesn’t take him seriously, eliciting laughter from the guests and thus forcing him to abandon the live programme. Then, the picture turns black and white, and the action moves to 1962, where we see Leinert accompanying his supervisor Dr Strathen (Hanns Zischler) as he travels to a physics congress set to take place in a hotel in the Swiss Alps, where an Iranian scientist promises to reveal a “groundbreaking theory of quantum mechanics”.

Even though this premise may sound engaging enough, what comes next is actually a series of rather casual events and a parade of bizarre characters, all of which will remain unexplained until the end. First, the Iranian scientist is nowhere to be found. Next, Johannes seems to discover – quite nonchalantly and rapidly – another “groundbreaking theory” (which seems to be based on the Iranian scientist’s findings), but only one other professor called Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss) takes him seriously. After one drink too many, Blumberg exits the elevator and sees what looks like a classical spatio-temporal tunnel. The next day, he is mysteriously found dead (the corpse is horribly disfigured by an unknown radioactive substance), but we realise he might not be dead after all. Another obscure character emerges, Karin (Olivia Ross), a young jazz pianist who speaks French. Karin engages in strange, sparse conversations with Johannes, as if she knows him already (but not that well) and sometimes as if she is scared by his presence. After a very brief romance, Karin will become Johannes’ obsession throughout, and the whole plot will keep on teetering between his desperate search for Karin and his attempts to explain the nature of the extraordinary events taking place in the hotel and its surroundings.

The performances are uninspired, especially those of the two leads, but it’s fair to say that working on this type of clunky material is also no easy task. Ross doesn’t manage to build any empathic bond with the audience – everything is so mysterious about her personality and her past that you may well lose interest in her fate quite fast. Meanwhile, Johannes is a silent, self-centred type who, most of the time, is a victim and a passive witness to the events unfolding.

The instrumental score – courtesy of Diego Ramos Rodríguez – is well crafted and deliberately echoes that of old thriller classics from the 1940s and 1950s, but its presence is invasive and overwhelming. Even when the actors utter random lines and there’s no tension, it kicks in, quite unnecessarily.

All in all, The Universal Theory seems to be an overambitious project, which tries hard to draw inspiration from many classics and genres (noir films, Hitchcock, and even the Netflix series Dark, to cite a few) without ultimately using all of these homages to say anything fresh or appealing. The picture basically tells us that something eerie happened there in 1962, and it had something to do with spatio-temporal paradoxes, but little more.

The Universal Theory was produced by Germany’s Ma.ja.de Fiction and The Barricades, Austria’s Panama Films, and Switzerland’s Catpics. Charades is selling the picture internationally.

Photogallery 02/09/2023: Venice 2023 - The Theory of Everything

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Timm Kröger, Rajko Jazbec, David Bohun, Lixi Frank, Viktoria Stolpe, Heino Deckert, Tina Börner, Sarah Born, Jan Bülow, Olivia Ross, Hanns Zischler, Gottfried Breitfuss
© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it