The Universal Theory (15)

Subtitled

A quantum physicist turns sleuth when a series of gruesome murders occur at an academic alpine summit in Timm Kröger’s heavily stylised noir.

This twisty German film takes the notion of the multiverse for a spin and sends it into a deep orbit. The result is a strange and bleak work of retro sci-fi and reality bending.

We first meet German physicist Johannes Leinart (Jan Bülow) 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. He travels to Switzerland for a conference on physics; with guests left to their own devices, Johannes’s attention moves to pianist Karin (Olivia Ross): he falls in love, to the point of obsession.

But there’s something weird going on inside the Swiss mountains, perhaps connected to the scientists’ experiments with uranium for the Nazis during the not-so-distant war. 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