The Universal Theory (Timm Kröger, 2023).
Familiar names come loaded with certain sets of expectations, and so it was at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where the official competition was chock-full with the latest features from known quantities. One of the great pleasures of festivalgoing lies in the thrill of discovery, of stepping into a film unburdened by one’s mileage with a director’s previous work. In the 2023 competition, there was only one title that promised a leap into the dark.
Timm Kröger was at the festival back in 2014 with his graduation film, The Council of Birds, which played in the Critics’ Week sidebar. The film wasn’t picked up for distribution, even in the director’s native Germany, and remains virtually impossible to see. Given the sheer ambition of his sophomore feature, it’s tempting to imagine that the intervening nine years had been spent readying The Universal Theory for production. But Kröger is also an award-winning cinematographer, most recently lensing—as well as producing—his partner Sandra Wollner’s provocative AI fable, The Trouble with Being Born (2020).
“This film is supposed to feel like a dream,” writes Kröger of The Universal Theory in his director’s statement, “one that is allowed to be as strange as it is entertaining, and which also repeatedly recurs to a cinema of yesteryear—or rather: to an amalgamated memory-image of cinema, sort of as if Hitchcock and Lynch (and countless others, known or forgotten) made love on the carpet of an old hotel lobby.” It’s quite the image, but a fitting one for a film that so assuredly—and eccentrically—couples classicism with a singular genre-bending moxie.
Shot in invigorating black-and-white ‘Scope, and boasting a sonorous orchestral score by Diego Ramos Rodriguez, the film follows a young doctoral student, Johannes (Jan Bülow), to a physics congress in the Swiss Alps in 1962, where a scientist is due to unveil his “groundbreaking theory of quantum mechanics.” When the scientist doesn’t show up, the attendees take to the ski slopes, leaving Johannes behind to pursue Karin (Olivia Ross), the enigmatic jazz pianist who captured his attention at the inaugural reception. Karin seems to know things about Johannes—private memories never before shared. When physicists start dropping dead, their heads caved in, and Karin vanishes into the alpine air, Johannes begins to investigate the mysteries buried within the mountain, unearthing a hidden portal that seems to point to a multiverse of parallel realities populated by doppelgängers and nefarious secret agents.
Synthesizing noir, sci-fi, and melodrama into a haunted tale of romantic obsession, The Universal Theory is a film about lives half- and misremembered and whose very style resembles an oneiric collation of cinematic echoes. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) might be the first film that comes to mind (and by extension, that film’s own echo in Brian De Palma’s Obsession, 1976) but its nimbleness throws up a surfeit of influences—not least, come an electrifying climactic set piece deep within the mountain, the adventure films of Steven Spielberg. Which isn’t to say that The Universal Theory trades in postmodern, spot-the-reference irony. Rather, for all its humor, it’s an elegiac film about nostalgia; steeped in twentieth-century history and forged from the whispers of our collective cultural subconscious. “Just like Johannes,” writes Kröger, “we might not know who wrote the strange music coming down the hall, but we sure recognise the melody.”
The Universal Theory (Timm Kröger, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: You were first in Venice with The Council of Birds (2014).
TIMM KRÖGER: That’s right. It was set in the 1920s, about a composer gone missing in a very German forest. There are some similarities to this new film, but it was also the project where I met a lot of my collaborators. That took us directly to this film, even if it took a long time.
NOTEBOOK: It’s quite the collaborative creative partnership you’ve forged together. You’ve all worked on each other’s films over those nine years.
KRÖGER: I met Sandra [Wollner] just around the time I finished the first film, and we’ve been partners ever since. I also worked camera on her last two projects, which was so inspiring to me because I was able to learn so much. She just has a completely different way of making films that I could never come up with, so it was a complete delight to be able to be a part of that. She was a huge help on this film as my creative advisor, and my second pair of eyes on set. My screenwriter, Roderick [Warich], also co-wrote Sandra’s last film, so we all grew closer that way. Roderick wrote my first feature too, and he was crucial for this film.
I had an idea that was very clear to me: a film called The Universal Theory. I saw black-and-white mountains, a physicists’ congress with physicists skiing in this playful, almost naïve way, but a very Lynchian feeling of dread underneath it all too. I knew I wanted that to be my next film. I knew it had to be set in the 1960s, but it was Roderick who figured out the plot that made it all work. I knew it was going to be a kind of love story gone wrong, and I had all the characters in mind. The way they speak and behave is mine, but Roderick really helped me shape how the paranoia shifts into confusion and then into something else entirely. I couldn’t have done this film without him. Roderick is just shooting his second feature film, by the way. It’s called Soi Dogs, and is being shot by Theory’s cinematographer, Roland Stuprich.
NOTEBOOK: Was the pastiche element there from the beginning?
KRÖGER: I reckon the pastiche element was a core idea. I don’t want to only call it “pastiche,” though, because I never wanted it to just be this post-ironic play with genres. It is that too, but I really like a simultaneity of emotions that don’t really fit together. I think films can take something seriously while also undermining it at the same time, especially with music. That’s what drew me to this setting, because in a way it’s so out of touch, so fantastical. It feels like vintage cinema straight away, and you can go to very dark places with it, but there’s also a comedic element. I loved that from the get-go, and we had a lot of fun with it.
Everyone talks about the multiverse stuff now, but when Roderick came up with it back then, we still thought it was pretty original. Of course we knew it from some films and shows, but it wasn’t everywhere like it is now. It’s really taken off, and I’m not sure I know the reason for that, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter for our film because we’ve found our own way of tackling the thing, employing it for some kind of psychological horror. If you really think about it, this film is told via dreams and false memories, or memories that stand a little to the side of the reality that we seem to be in. It all lends a sense of paranoia which connects very neatly to the film noir genre, which is of course steeped in paranoia. Generational trauma too, to some degree.
The Universal Theory (Timm Kröger, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: The film embraces multiple genres, while sounding its own nebulous echoes from film history. I started thinking about so many different films and filmmakers while I was watching it—Leni Riefenstahl’s mountain films, Fritz Lang, Hitchcock and De Palma, Spielberg . . .
KRÖGER: I love to talk about Spielberg! The wonderful thing about this film is that we never really employed direct references, we just let ourselves be guided by a desire to put things together in new ways. With the music it’s a little bit different, but for the images we just let ourselves be guided by half-remembered childhood images of films, also very peculiar postwar German cinema that is—perhaps deservedly so—quite unknown to the world. That was the dream state I wanted to immerse myself in, while immersing the audience in a weird state where they feel they know this world, but it’s very off in certain ways, so that something new comes out of it. The beautiful thing is that, because it’s a film about the unconscious in some fashion, everyone can spot different films in there, including some that I maybe haven’t even heard about.
NOTEBOOK: You say there are no direct references, but the typeface you use for your opening credits looks pretty close to the one used in Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981].
KRÖGER: You’re the first critic to spot it!
NOTEBOOK: The credits also open on a shot of a mountain, just like the Paramount logo dissolve at the start of Raiders. That film’s finale looks like it may have influenced the cave sequence here, and your opening with the two children is pregnant with Spielbergian wonder. Let’s talk a little about Spielberg, then.
KRÖGER: We also have to talk about George Lucas. He built a template—and I think Brian De Palma’s probably a part of this too, given his relationship to Hitchcock—for taking childhood memories of cinema or television and re-adapting them into something new. There are so many films that I remember that made their way in here, almost like some dark, weird, German version of Indiana Jones that perhaps feels more Kafkaesque than adventurous. In a way, it’s exactly what would happen in my mind if you transpose the action adventures of an American archeologist to a German character from the ’60s—you end up with a passive, much more introverted protagonist, a physicist who is thrown around in a strange world he is not really able to navigate or understand.
The Universal Theory (Timm Kröger, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: That sense of “half-remembered images” and “false memories” extends to the music too. I was convinced that Karin’s piano theme was by John Williams, from something like Empire of the Sun [1987] or maybe Always [1989]. I was sure that I knew it from somewhere, but I just couldn’t place where it was from.
KRÖGER: I think the piano music in Empire of the Sun is mostly Chopin. John Williams wrote for all sorts of things. He scored a Clint Eastwood movie, and things like Sabrina [1995] and Always—movies that people don’t watch so much these days, and maybe for good reason. Did you find out where it’s actually from?
NOTEBOOK: I trawled through some John Williams playlists but couldn’t find the composition I was thinking of anywhere.
KRÖGER: I actually lifted it from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life [2011].
NOTEBOOK: Oh, of course!
KRÖGER: The piece is in there all the time, like a kind of leitmotif. It’s not his, as in it wasn’t written for that film. It’s by François Couperin, a French Baroque composer, and I liked the piece for its mathematical qualities. We weaved it into the jazz piece she plays, and then you hear it later on as a pure melody before Johannes interrupts her in the night, and so on. It felt like this enigmatic piece of music. It’s called “Les Barricades Mistérieuses”—The Mysterious Barricades—but we don’t know what that means. It could be a reference to transcendental things, or even to mathematics, because it’s written in a kind of fractal way, where patterns evolve and re-emerge out of each other. It’s really neat music, and kind of old for what it does, but Bach was also doing similar things around the same time. It’s so intricately woven, and if you play it in a certain way, like Glenn Gould would have, it becomes emotional as well, because you can project so much fragility into it.
So I loved that piece, and the film, I guess, is about the mysterious barricades between worlds, and that became a kind of template for her character. Bernard Herrmann and Paul Misraki were also a huge influence on the orchestral music, and I always wanted to combine it with something more modern like Ligeti. My friend Diego [Ramos Rodriguez] is a contemporary composer, and he was just perfect for this because he had never done film music. He’s wildly more intelligent than I am. He had a certain resistance, I guess, especially to John Williams because he’s so ubiquitous. It’s a bit like the typeface Helvetica: ubiquity breeds contempt, perhaps especially in the contemporary music world. But we listened to lots of stuff I really liked, also from my childhood, and his resistance turned into fascination, or at least respect, and he made the thing completely his own. It’s lovely and intricately crafted, and the film couldn’t work without it.
The Universal Theory (Timm Kröger, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: The idea of cinema as a hall of distorted mirrors plays into the film’s multiverse conceit, in which past and present collide, and doppelgängers roam. The film’s strength lies in keeping the purpose and function of the portal somewhat ambiguous. What are your views on its metaphorical implications?
KRÖGER: I guess the film is one of many in which the story inevitably leads you to a kind of transcendental room or space—think of Stalker [1979] or 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], for instance. In our case it’s some kind of portal. It’s always hard to show these spaces because you feel that whatever you’re going to see is likely going to disappoint you. Because in a sense, after all this buildup of mysteries, you expect nothing less than the sublime, something unexpected. Something that is, perhaps, unexpectable.
In terms of visuals, I basically “gave up” at some point. We settled for something that feels somewhat impressionistic, handmade and old-fashioned, Rorschach-like, and only a little bit uncanny. I’m pretty happy with it now, but the could-have-beens of this scene kept me worried for a long time. I don’t want to spoil the mystery of what happens throughout the film—it’s way too much fun to not know and discover, I hope—but the basic backstory is quite simple and sci-fi-ish. I think most people will get it at some point—at least the most important aspects. What I will say is that there seem to be characters who came from different worlds, perhaps different times, and these characters seem to want to go back to their own. Karin, most importantly. She obviously knows another version of Johannes from her own past—and to her, our main character is the false doppelgänger.
NOTEBOOK: There is an implication that the Johannes we’ve been following is not the “real” Johannes, or at least just one of an infinite procession of Johannes’s. Tell me about the various iterations or readings of the character that coexist within the film.
KRÖGER: I joke that Schrödinger’s cat, in this film, is both a genius and brain dead at the same time. Johannes’s trajectory seems laid out in a very classical way: he struggles with his theories, but if this were conventional American cinema, he would be bound to succeed in the end, going through all the motions, the dark night of the soul and everything. He’d end up becoming the genius he’s supposed to be. That’s a possibility we allude to. Karin knows a version of him that we never really get to see. But in our story, he keeps existing in a kind of floating state of paranoia, and ends up in a world in which, fundamentally, nobody believes him and his story is being misrepresented. I found that quite comical. It’s all a bit more than that, though. In many sci-fi stories there’s a kind of showdown, where the doppelgängers get asked a question that only the “real” one will be able to answer. But a kind of real horror, I think, emerges from this: what if we all, in a sense, are our own false doppelgängers, and what if there is no “true” version of ourselves?
NOTEBOOK: I found the epilogue to be particularly moving. How did this structural device evolve?
KRÖGER: This was also Roderick’s idea, and I loved it. I used to dabble in essayistic documentaries, and I love voiceovers. We both shared some kind of affection for Chris Marker and a narrative device that could feel Truffaut-like in this melancholy kind of way. It was also the best way to emerge from the assumed “naïveté” of all the other genres and emotions and pastiche-like trappings that the film explores from the start. The film becomes a bit more mature, as it were, and, I suppose in a weird way, more relevant to our present reality. That’s why Roderick also brought in archival footage. For a couple of seconds, we see real events unfold as we know them (in Germany) from our television screens. Through the voiceover—which, incidentally, is spoken by the wonderful German filmmaker Dominik Graf—we also learn of a Soviet moon landing. So that was lovely. But for all the film’s somewhat cerebral structure, we also wanted to end on something that takes you to an emotional place you might not expect. And I personally think there’s nothing more emotional or touching than the passage of time, the tragic realization of missed opportunities, and the ghosts of history.