The Universal Theory
Timm Kröger’s film “The Universal Theory,” a German-origin metaphysical riddle, is centered around a young physicist who goes to the Swiss Alps to attend a scientific conference on quantum mechanics but gets embroiled in a mess of paranoia, conspiracy and murder instead.
Coming back to the mountainous landscape of Kröger’s first feature film, which he seems to be in a constant attempt to examine in various ways (it opened at GDIFF; distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories), the region is as full of mystery as it is discursive most notably to Bastiani’s “The Magic Mountain’s” fictional plot take place in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps and more or less introspective clumps. But the most intriguing is, perhaps, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” with its iconic cut of Gregory Peck and Grace Kelly skiing down a treacherous slope and the avalanche of memories it produced.
For Johannes (Jan Bülow), a graduate student who still has not published his long-winding thesis on the possible presence of more than one universe, the trip to the first conference held in 1962 with his PhD supervisor Dr. Strathan (Hanns Zischler) is an excellent occasion to witness the Iranians speaking of a scientist’s quantum mechanics that this scientist considers to be advancement to his work.
But Johannes, in the first of a string of odd and seemingly random events up in the hills, when the scientist is still nowhere to be seen is forced to fend for himself. Everyone freezes during the peak, and, while some other participants go snowboarding, Johannes meets a different scholar, Dr. Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss), who rather strangely warms up to his theorization, much to Strathan’s annoyance. Both of them studied under Heisenberg for which it is almost inevitable that many decades later, Blumberg has affected feelings toward the Nazi scientist.
Johannes himself, however, has a better time imagining a captivating jazz pianist by the name of Karin (Olivia Ross) whom he first lays eyes upon at the reception, and who him rather strangely. Karin scorns him at first but eventually puts her lips on Johannes that no one most certainly should know. Eventually, two are bound to start a short love affair with his gradually turning into a large obsession over her.
After a scientist dies, brutally mutilated, but later turns up alive, Johannes gets down to what he preferences an easy kind of detective work, and finds more clues odd mists over mountains, hurtful soldiers, tunnels in the mountain, unusual landslides that only increase the pain and turmoil in him.
To describe the core of “The Universal Theory,’ one could say it is infused with sounds and the exuberance of the dramatic parts. Johannes engages himself into what the director wants him to do sequentially, without having excess ideas about what he needs to seek after. ‘The Third Man’ has the sounds of trade, drizzle, and endless bustle of the film industry that emerged Vietnam War.
The movie directed an enormous emotionally expressive purpose towards general militaristic themes. Set during the Cold War, “The Universal Theory” integrates mythic mystery moments with imagination and was produced relying on the perspective of the 1960s and 70s.
Instead the studied effect of the film and the dry characterizations of the two leads performances, whose pathetic and doomed romance like everything else that happened is unfolded far too quickly and both feel its more conspiratorial than fated aspects, together with the temporally aesthetic nitro charge of the era engender a childish prurience. For everything the film looks for, including cracks in real life and an alternate universe, “The Universal Theory” argues the case for only one thing the shifty nature of reality itself, and the love of the director for his sources. Under the circumstances It is therefore understandable that Kröger seeks more to suggest a nostalgia for classic rather than actually classical cinema. He pursues this delusion with relentless, but the end result of his intricate and intricate narrative is more a parlor trick than a true illusion.
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