The Universal Theory

Wednesday 7 May at 7.30pm

Timm Kröger | Germany/Austria/Switzerland | 2023 | 118 mins | M violence & content that may disturb

In co-operation with the Goethe-Institut
This heady sci-fi thriller takes us on a gripping cinematic voyage packed with astute film references, Hitchcockian suspense and brain-melting metaphysics.

“This fiendishly clever and inventive sci-fi embraces the possibility that a person or object can have one or more duplicates… It opens with strung-out novelist Johannes Leinert (Jan Bülow) appearing on a German chat show in 1974. He’s supposedly there to plug a novel about the existence of parallel worlds called The Theory of Everything. Except, he explains to the baffled host, it’s not a novel. All of it is real… In German filmmaker Timm Kröger’s assured hands, all this plays like a journey of scientific discovery or a descent into madness—occasionally both at the same time—and his Hitchcockian style is story-enhancing rather than show-offy pastiche… You could be watching Spellbound in some smoky 1940s picturehouse. The Universal Theory takes a cue or two from Chris Marker’s seminal New Wave noodle-twister La Jetée, too. But just as it seems to be clever clogs hard sci-fi… it steps back from the blackboard and turns swooningly romantic, charting the path of an impossible love across time and space… It might be the most intimate multiverse movie ever made.”—Phil de Semlyen, Time Out