A film can legitimately be born from the desire to evoke other films, authors and eras, but is the exclusive purpose of this evocation enough to make it a full-bodied object? This is the problem that arises before the beautiful The Universal Theory, by German Timm Kröger. A film that seems eager to offer a feast to the refined senses of any cinephile, defining as a priority the visual and sound delight that comes from a grammar stolen from quite recognizable aesthetics of old cinema – through them, the spectator enters the game of images, accommodates yourself on the couch of multiple references, without it actually mattering where you are going. Kröger, a young director making his second feature film, took this risk of exercising style, and the results are as appealing in formal terms as they are vague and fragile in content.
Said that, The Universal Theory it has something inside: its central narrative block takes place in 1962, in the overwhelming landscape of the Swiss Alps, where a doctoral student in Quantum Physics, Johannes Leinert (Jan Bülow), accompanies his thesis advisor at an international Physics congress. . whose lecturer disappeared. Just the first of several strange phenomena that will involve the protagonist’s stay in a remote luxury hotel frequented by characters with a ghostly streak, be it a professor named Blumberg, who is a former Nobel candidate and seems to have unresolved issues with the said advisor, is a mysterious woman, Karin, who plays the piano in the hotel’s jazz band and awakens in Johannes a kind of romantic obsession, which becomes even more enigmatic when she proves to be knowledgeable about episodes from his childhood, which had never been revealed To nobody.
Tags: cinephiles
