Rating: NR | Runtime: 118 minutes
Release Date: October 26th, 2023 (Germany) / September 27th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Neue Visionen Filmverleih / Oscilloscope Laboratories
Director(s): Timm Kröger
Writer(s): Roderick Warich & Timm Kröger

Nobody is allowed in there.

For some, hearing director Timm Kröger (who co-wrote with Roderick Warich) talk about The Universal Theory as being “a dream” will only make them angry. They’ll leave the film with questions only to discover there aren’t any answers because those questions were the goal. Those same sentiments conversely provide me clarity. Not just because they mean I wasn’t too dumb to figure out the answers, but also because there’s something wonderful in that inability to ever know. It leaves the characters to exist ambiguously outside the plot. Because they aren’t riding tracks towards a concrete destination. They’re cutting their own path.

What we see on-screen is simultaneously reality and fiction to Johannes Leinert (Jan Bülow). Yes, he experienced that which plays out. But how much can he truly believe when he’s unable to explain how any of it was possible? That’s why his publisher refused to let his tale go out to the public in its original form: a doctoral thesis in quantum mechanics that speculates a multiverse. It’s instead billed as a novel. Science fiction. The fantastical noir adventure of a young physicist caught in a series of anomalous events that occurred in the Swiss Alps circa 1962. Like Johannes’ supervisor (Hanns Zischler’s Dr. Strathen) posits: “You cannot defend a thesis without evidence.”

So, we watch the events unfold ourselves. Johannes (via Kröger) puts us in the position of a first-hand observer to give his story credence while also understanding the reality that our corroboration won’t help sway a skeptic. Because what we see is impossible. So impossible that neither those passively letting it happen to them (Johannes) nor those actively causing it (Olivia Ross’s Karin Hönig, among others) are in control. The latter camp obviously has a better handle on the phenomenon than the former, but they nevertheless remain passengers. Its mysteries and conspiracies can’t combat our innate human desire for importance.

That’s where I really connected with The Universal Theory. It looks and feels great with its homage to cinematic history’s noirs of old via black and white cinematography, embellished visual cues, and overt score, but it’s still yet another entry into the multiverse canon that’s seemingly taken over the medium of late. Whereas most examples focus on a single vantage with which to designate superiority (a “true” timeline), Kröger leans into the chaotic nature inherent to the collective ignorance of believing ourselves to be the protagonist. Just because Johannes is our lead doesn’t mean he matters most. He might be his own “true” Johannes, but he’s a “fake” to every other iteration.

This realization allows for the mysteries to compound as well as the possibility that he isn’t quite the genius some think. Or maybe he is and fate just happens to pull him out of his natural universe to suffer failure instead. Because it isn’t necessarily that people are moving between worlds here. It’s almost as if the world is being changed around them at such a high speed that it cannot quite keep up, leaving a body behind even as the next alteration allows that same person to live again. The MacGuffin isn’t as much a portal as it is a dice roll. A boy who lived through WWII to see Hitler prove victorious is suddenly told the Allies won. A child who died in the Holocaust is suddenly in her twenties having survived.

Every act has an infinite number of choices. Maybe Dr. Strathen likes Johannes’s thesis. Maybe Prof. Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss) steals it. Maybe a mother tells her son to run. Maybe a boy’s far-fetched tale isn’t dismissed sight unseen. We’re as much along for the ride as the characters on-screen and those who seem to “know” what’s happening are just as in the dark to what will happen as us. There’s a refreshing sense of uncertainty at play that allows a definitively narrated epilogue to divert from what we thought was a definitively presented prologue. But just as everything that occurs in-between is altered without cause to expose “truth” as a construct, that beginning and end are each one likelihood amongst many.

Because while we think we can change an outcome through our own actions, one purposeful decision is ultimately meaningless in the face of an infinite number of peripheral decisions purposefully made by an infinite number of others who are at any given time both alive and dead.

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Olivia Ross (l) and Jan Bülow (r) in THE UNIVERSAL THEORY; courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories.