THE UNIVERSAL THEORY
A Review by Ariadne Si Suo
‘ – How did you come up with it? – I dreamt it.’
Hitchcockian suspense, Lynchian dream logic, film noir aesthetic, with a dose of quantum physics, THE UNIVERSAL THEORY (DIE THEORIE VON ALLEM) has everything a cinephile would hope for. Timm Kröger is a cinematographer turned director, and it shows. The black and white visuals by Roland Stuprich are breathtaking and timeless, serving as a nostalgic love letter to classic film noir and French new wave eras.
In 1962, physicist Johannes (Jan Bülow) travels to the Swiss Alps with his doctoral supervisor to attend a scientific congress. The train journey already sets the unsettling tone – dark hues of black, overly bright lamps, faces repeatedly emerging and disappearing into nothingness, and the train driving into the mountains like the opening sequence of The Shining. It feels like a trip to another world.
Johannes struggles to complete his dissertation on multiverses, and his supervisor is dismissive of his work. ‘Sometimes you wake up in the morning with insights, feeling as if you’ve seen into another world, where the proof already exists.’ Johannes came up with his theory from the dreams, believing in inspirations over calculations. Meanwhile, the outside world is changing. Strange cloud formations. Mysterious jazz pianist Karin (Olivia Ross) who knows Johannes’s childhood secrets. A series of sudden deaths in the Alps. Men who know the future. The dead re-emerge. Truths change. We are drawn into a web of sinister puzzles, against the backdrop of the eerie and ominous mountains.
Encounters feel like memories, and events feel like dreams. Karin has an unreal quality to her, from the first glance in the gloomy church to the mesmerising performance in front of the overexposed glittering background. Familiar figures from defining moments reappear – not just the same people, but the exact same visuals. Lights flicker frantically. We only see snippets of scenes, just like in dreams when we try hard to see but the visuals keep disappearing in front of us.
THE UNIVERSAL THEORY feels completely disorienting – full of contradictions, we are lost in the constant struggle to put together a logical answer. The cinematography stays bizarre, dream-like, and hauntingly beautiful. Patterns repeat. Memories forgotten. Reality becomes fluid. It’s a brilliant tribute to Last Year at Marienbad. Yet this time, it might be about the mental state of a physics PhD student, and the madness induced from writing one’s dissertation.
The ending sequence is almost an epic poem. We come away feeling as if we’ve finally understood something, yet it soon becomes a hazy memory, and a colour no one can see. Perhaps it’s about non-existence of the past, ambiguity of the truth, and how the world just moves on without us. Perhaps we’re reading too much into it – the whole film could also just be a fever dream of someone who longs to go back to the lost era, listens to some jazz, and immerses themselves in the monochrome world of some of the greatest filmmakers. THE UNIVERSAL THEORY is a lucid dream that lingers on into reality.