Director: Timm Kröger (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Year of Release: 2023
1974, Hamburg. A tv chat show. A youngish and slightly dishevelled man wearing a mid-period Jeremy Corbyn beard is being interviewed about his new book The Theory of Everything. As the host continues to ask about his novel, the intense man protests that it’s not a novel. So, it’s your real life? The man gets up and storms out of the room, pausing only to address the camera. “Karin”, he says, “if you see this, wherever you are, get in touch”.
Suddenly we switch from the almost square, colour format to widescreen black and white. A caption tells us that it’s 12 years earlier. A student, Johannes Leinert, is accompanying his professor, Dr. Strathen, on a steam train to Switzerland. They’re going to a lecture by an Iranian academic Sharam Amiri who is promising to present a groundbreaking lecture on quantum physics entitled “The Theory of Everything”.
Johannes’s thesis is also around quantum physics. He’s looking for a universal waveform which would help us to understand everything, something to do with multiverses. His stuffy professor, though, is unimpressed, calling Johannes’s work “speculative”, “esoteric”, and a “treatise”. He returns the dissertation covered with comments and crossings out in red. Whenever his student tries to get creative, Strathen tells him to “shut up and calculate”.
On the train, they bump into the much more genial Professor Blumberg, who knows Strathen from way back when, when they both studied under Heisenberg. Blumberg, who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize, is much more interested in Johannes’s ideas, and offers him words of encouragement. It remains unclear how much of Blumberg’s support comes from an old fight with Strathen over a woman in whom they were both interested.
When they reach the hotel where the lecture is supposed to take place, there is no sign of Amiri. Visa problems, apparently, though the hosts are very vague. There is nothing to do but sit, wait, and go skiing (or in Johannes’s case, carry on working on his thesis). Meanwhile, strange cloud formations appear in the sky, and potential avalanches rumble. Not far from the hotel, we come across a disused uranium mine.
Popping out to a church, Johannes meets Karin, the beautiful pianist from the hotel’s jazz band, who he feels he has met before. Karin tells Johannes stories from his childhood which he has not told anyone else. They converse in French (this is a multilingual film. As well as French, German, and English, the film also contains dialogue in Schweizerdeutch, the impenetrable Swiss dialect that needed subtitles even for the German version).
After Johannes sees Karin and Blumberg on the ski slopes, Blumberg is found with his head caved in. Karin disappears, and Johannes finds notes in her room which are uncannily similar to his own academic work. Then Professor Blumberg returns from the dead. It’s not that things haven’t been weird so far, but the film now makes a turn towards the seriously inexplicable. From here on, I found myself regularly asking, “just what is going on?”
How much does the above description tell us about what actually happens in Die Theorie von Allem? Well, less than you’d think. This is a film which is much more about atmosphere than anything that actually happens. The fact that you are thoroughly confused (or maybe that’s just me) doesn’t seem to matter that much. If anything, it helps us empathise with Johannes, who is just as bewildered at what’s going on as any of us.
There are many aspects of Die Theorie von Allem which I would normally find very irritating. The concept of multiverses for one, which has inexplicably become part of the language of contemporary cinema. The idea that anything can happen destroys most dramatic tension, as you can just replay a scene in a different multiverse. So, when the dead start returning to life, I would normally get very annoyed.
Secondly, this is a film which takes hommage a little too far. There have a number of reviews where smug critics point out which obscure film is being referenced in which scene. Frankly, I don’t care. A film stands or falls on whether it works on its own terms, not in how much it is like anything else (exception to the rule: the hilarious nouvelle vague parody in the otherwise unchallenging When Brendan Met Trudy).
Die Theorie von Allem is so stylish that you forgive its annoying traits. The monochrome photography looks fantastic, and gives everything a noirish feel (the area beneath the uranium mine is very similar to subterranean Vienna in the Third Man – one of several post war films which are referenced). Or, as director Timm Kröger said in an interview: “this film is supposed to feel like a dream … which also repeatedly recurs to a cinema of yesteryear”
The mish-mash of styles and genres is somehow able to hold your attention and interest. I think I’d need another watch to be sure how well director Kröger deals with various issues which are thrown against the wall to see if they’ll stick. The legacy of Nazi Germany (of which Strathen and Blumberg are products), the Cold War, nuclear terror. All potentially fascinating, but there was all a bit too much going on for me to keep up.
Maybe if I watch again with a firmer grip of what’s happening, it’ll turn out to be pure hokum. Even then, you can’t say that Die Theorie von Allem is not an interesting film. And I’d rather watch something which aims high and fails, than one which doesn’t even try.
CinePhil 