Venice 2023: ‘The Theory of Everything’ is a Confusing Multiverse Tale
by Alex Billington
September 24, 2023
The multiverse subgenre of cinema is growing. There are a handful of new films every year exploring this uncharted new territory, experimenting with big ideas and mind-bending storytelling. Not every story will work, though, not every equation will produce a correct answer. Even though this film has quite a few issues with it, I still can’t stop thinking about it – weeks after first seeing it at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. The Theory of Everything (originally Die Theorie von Allem in German) is a German-Austrian-Swiss co-production from a German filmmaker named Timm Kröger (also the director of The Council of Birds). Not to be confused with the Oscar winning biopic (from 2014) about Stephen Hawking also called The Theory of Everything, this German The Theory of Everything is a unique multiverse tale. It’s one of the first clever attempts at mixing film noir with multiverse theory, integrating quantum mechanics thinking into a shady characters mystery plot. Most of it is rather confounding and strange, the film doesn’t quite come together as coherently it should, but it’s still worth mentioning as another experiment in this intellectual subgenre.
Cinema is going through a multiverse renaissance right now – between Everything Everywhere All at Once rightfully winning Best Picture, the groundbreaking Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse / Across the Spider-Verse / Beyond the Spider-Verse movies, along with Marvel dipping their toes in with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness & the Loki series, and DC trying it out with The Flash (which was a big failure). Of course there have been multiverse movies before this current era (Jet Li’s The One, The Butterfly Effect, Run Lola Run, Source Code, Donnie Darko, etc) but right now we’re in a vibrant Golden Age of multiverse movies, which bothers some (because they think it’s related to dumb comic book movies) and excites many others (who realize it’s really about quantum mechanics / string theory / physics / philosophy, etc), myself included. This is where Kröger’s The Theory of Everything fits right in. It doesn’t take long to understand what he’s trying to do – make a film noir multiverse movie meets romantic B&W mystery set in the Swiss mountains. It’s a cool idea for a film and Kröger throws in some scientific aspects to make it more grounded – not so fantastical or comic booky, closer to “this could’ve actually happened and we’d never really know.”
In The Theory of Everything, German actor Jan Bülow stars as Johannes Leinert, a young scientist who travels with his doctoral advisor to a physics congress in the Swiss Alps, where an Iranian scientist is set to reveal a “groundbreaking theory of quantum mechanics.” Most of the film is set in 1962 and it’s show in lush B&W cinematography by DP Roland Stuprich. Most of the film is also set in the mountains at this remote lodge. When everyone arrives at the hotel, the Iranian guest is nowhere to be found. As we follow Johannes around while everyone else goes skiing, everything starts to get strange – he he meets a peculiar jazz pianist woman named Karin, played by Olivia Ross, who seems to know secret details about him. One morning one of the physicists is found dead, and others start disappearing without a trace. As Johannes descends deeper into this mountainous mystery, he finds himself literally descending deeper into this mountain, discovering something incredible within. Kröger uses the film noir storytelling to turns this multiverse story into a scientific one with the question of – if multiverse theory is real, could this be a thrilling example of what might happen to one person wrapped up in all this? As with most noir stories, there is no clear answer.
Aside from using the same title as the Stephen Hawking film, which doesn’t really work well (what even is this theory, really?), the film has a number of other glaring flaws. The score by Diego Ramos Rodriguez & David Schweighart is obnoxiously loud and distracting, a highly melodic, symphonic sound that just doesn’t fit with the mysterious vibe (usually I like these kind of scores, but not for this film). Worst of all, the film’s narrative is especially confounding and indecipherable in the second half. There are some magical scenes that wowed me, but everything else will make everyone watching wonder “huh? what is going on?” Everyone I talked to after the screening in Venice couldn’t make sense of it either. I’m sure Kröger knows what he’s doing and has all the different narratives laid out in his mind, but this is a case where that just doesn’t translate and come across in the film. If most viewers can’t make sense of it on their first viewing, it’s a bad experience. Even if one day someone does explain everything and provide a guide as to who is from which multiverse and what happens to them, it still won’t magically make the film any better. That said, I admire his attempt to tell this kind of complex, intertwined story of multiverses & scientists. Just wish it was better.
Despite my frustrations and everyone’s confusion, I’m still thinking about this film and still thinking about how it tries to mix noir with quantum thinking. The Theory of Everything may not instantly join the ranks as one of the best modern multiverse movies, but it also doesn’t deserve to be forgotten entirely. This is even a part of the plot, with a line about how everyone shrugs it off as “just a strange story” of something that happened to Johannes. Maybe it really did happen? Would you believe it if someone told a story like this…?
Alex’s Venice 2023 Rating: 6 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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