DIRECTOR: Timm Kröger
PRODUCERS: Heino Deckert, Viktoria Stolpe, Timm Kröger
PRODUCTION CO: Ma.ja.de Fiction, The Barricades, Panama Film, Catpics AG
SCREENPLAY: Timm Kröger, Roderick Warich
PHOTOGRAPHY: Roland Stuprich
EDITOR: Jann Anderegg
MUSIC: Diego Ramos Rodríguez

WITH: Jan Bülow (Johannes Leinert), Olivia Ross (Karin Hönig), Hanns Zischler (Dr. Julius Strathen), Gottfried Breitfuss (Professor Blumberg), David Bennent (Kommissar Arnold), Philippe Graber (Kommissar Amrein) 
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FESTIVALS: Venice

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REVIEW

“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. 
Then we’re flashing back to 12 years before that testy TV appearance and a congress of physicists in an wintry Alpine hotel, where a younger Leinert, a PhD student with a promising paper to his name, soon picks up distinct vibes that not all is as it should be at the resort. Shadowy scarred men, missing scientists, unexpected avalanches, and, soon, a corpse add menace to the mystery. A beautiful young jazz pianist (Killing Eve’s Olivia Ross, channelling Anna Karina) knows a lot more about him than is seems possible.

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. The score channels Hitchcock’s composer Bernard Hermann to elegant effect, and the crisp black-and-white cinematography lends the hotel’s snowy surrounds a blinding dazzle and noirish shadows to its interiors. 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

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FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS*

Dunedin  
Wednesday, 07 May, 7.30pm

Nelson 
Wednesday, 14 May, 6.00pm

Palmerston North
Wednesday, 21 May, 6.00pm

Auckland  
Monday, 09 June, 6.15pm

Canterbury  
Monday, 16 June, 7.00pm

Hamilton  
Monday, 23 June, 6.30pm

Wellington  
Monday, 07 July, 6.15pm

Wellington  
Monday, 07 July, 8.30pm

New Plymouth  
Wednesday, 16 July, 6.00pm​

Whanganui   
Monday, 28 July, 7.00pm

Westport  
Wednesday, 13 August, 7.00pm

​*Non-members welcome by donation (notes only please)​

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See more GERMAN CINEMA >>

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German Cinema selection presented in
co-operation with the Goethe-Institut

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