The Universal Theory: a deliciously cryptic quantum thriller
A quantum physicist turns sleuth when a series of gruesome murders occur at an academic alpine summit in Timm Kröger’s heavily stylised sci-fi noir.
We first meet German physicist Johannes Leinart in 1974, as a guest on a talk show, looking dishevelled and slightly haunted. He’s there to plug his novel The Universal Theory, a tale of love and fate, parallel universes and murderous conspiracy – though he insists that this is no fiction but an account of events that unravelled at a scientific congress 12 years earlier.
Johannes is played by Jan Bülow with a convincing blend of quiet melancholy and bumbling charm – he always seems to be missing something, as though he exists in a parallel universe. A young student of physics who lives with his mother, he is unfulfilled in both his personal life and his career. When his mentor, the spiky Dr Strathern (Hanns Zischler), arrives to accompany Johannes to the ill-fated conference in the Swiss Alps, it offers excitement – a chance to discuss his own progressive theories before a spot of skiing.
On the train they meet Dr Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss), a barrel of a man who in another life would still be working under the Third Reich. At the hotel, as strange cloud formations gather above and unexplained sounds boom from below, it’s revealed that the Iranian scientist for whom the seminar has been arranged has failed to materialise. With conference guests left to their own devices, Johannes’s attention moves to pianist Karin (Olivia Ross): he falls in love, to the point of obsession.
However, she seems to know more about Johannes than she should – as though one or both of them has landed in an alternate reality. Filming in black and white, director Timm Kröger plays with the tropes of film noir and thriller: Karin is a kind of doomed femme fatale, Johannes sleuths a series of gruesome murders, while Diego Ramos Rodríguez’s score brings melodrama as well as suspense. However, when the murders link to a series of doppelgängers and the unearthly rumble, noirish tropes are stirred into a more unsettling science-fiction elixir and, discovering a portal beneath the mountain, Johannes encounters Karin for the final time.
The film moves into a poignant but cryptic epilogue: while his novel becomes a cult classic and then a (comically bad) film, Johannes can only think about Karin, neglecting his wife and child in favour of this obsession. What began as Hitchcockian suspense now feels closer in weight to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) or Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), a bittersweet existential fantasy. The Universal Theory asks more questions than it answers; whether it is intended as a critique of Cold War paranoia, personal loss or post-war national guilt is unclear but perhaps doesn’t matter. In allowing the relationship between Johannes and Karin to be ambiguous – a fleeting affair or the multiverse getting its wires crossed? – Kröger creates a world as hopeful as it is melancholy. While Johannes is broken by this lost love, somewhere there is a different version of him who wasn’t.
► The Universal Theory is in UK cinemas now.