You could be forgiven for thinking initially that the new German film The Universal Theory, with its epic Alpine vastness, sweeping historical millieu, and heady quantum mechanics context, is one of those ambitious projects that will, ultimately, strive to turn your head inside out. But it is actually a very modest movie, whose old-school filmmaking ambitions are inversely proportional to what the screenplay finally delivers. It bears every sign of lusting to be Christopher Nolan-esque — but whereas Nolan’s high-concept sci-fi ventures (Inception, Interstellar, Tenet) always ended up swapping out coherence and common sense for “Look at me, Ma” CGI flourishes, Kroger’s movie begins with close to no concept at all. You shouldn’t name-check physicist Werner Heisenberg unless you’ve got a high-voltage quantum-y idea in your back pocket, but co-writer/director Timm Kröger, in his second film in 10 years, leans instead on wide-screen spectacle. Getting serious visual mileage out of Alpine scenery is probably not hard, but even so, Kroger and DP Roland Stuprich make a lavish Ansel Adams banquet out of it, in high-contrast black and white; even the looming Old Euro interiors (churches, hotels, caverns, etc.) are lit with intense shadowy menace. Leaning hard on neo-Hitchcockian style, the film’s visual character ends up feeling overwrought, with even minor moments, like walking across a room, bulked up with portentous dolly shots and dramatic shock cuts. You can virtually smell the doubt Kroger had about his story, by way of how he’s compensating with cinematographic cartwheels. That story concerns a young physicist-in-training (Jan Bülow), who in 1962 trains it to a conference in the Alps to introduce his paper on a revolutionary post-quantum multiverse-adjacent theory he “feels” is correct, even if he’s still working out the math. His craggy mentor (Hanns Zischler) thinks it’s balderdash, but another old crow (Gottfried Breitfuss) thinks it’s brilliant. Our hero meets and becomes obsessed with the hotel’s pianist (Olivia Ross), who no one else seems to see, and who knows impossibly intimate things about his childhood past. Avalanches, ski debacles, drunken arguments over black-tie dinners: You are there. Eventually, slowly, Bulow’s po-faced newbie (he has the pouty opacity of Franz Rogowski, but duller) starts seeing doubles, murdered bodies start turning up, the pianist disappears, skin rashes become a thing, and there’s some kind of conspiracy boiling in the old uranium mines nearby. You squint through the over-backlit fog of over-smoking in hopes of finding out exactly what mystery the protagonist is trying to solve, what the conspiracy is, what’s happening underground, and what any of it has to do, even glancingly, with quantum mechanics. Traces of WWII espionage scarring and survivor’s guilt arise, and hints of time travel are in the air. Bask, if you will, in the darkling panoramas and proto–Fritz Langian couture, but before long you’ll realize the film is not going to answer any of its own questions. If the hero is going mad, and the narrative’s business is a subjective nightmare, then you’d expect a Shutter Island–style gotcha. Instead, Kroger climaxes with a narrated mini-history of the hero’s petering-out life through the rest of the 20th century, suggesting rueful historical fallout that could’ve resonated, in a German context, if the screenplay had taken history, or science, seriously in the first place. ❖           The post Review: ‘The Universal Theory’ Suffers From Observer Effect appeared first on LA Weekly.