This fiendishly clever and inventive sci-fi embraces the possibility that a person or object can have one or more duplicates. So the fact that it come with the exact same title as another movie about quantum mechanics seems less like a piece of low-key trolling designed to confuse Eddie Redmayne fans than a nicely meta way to get us all warmed up for its mind-bending ideas.
It opens with strung-out novelist Johannes Leinert (Tom Burke lookalikey Jan Bülow) appearing on a German chat show in 1974. He’s supposedly there to plug a novel about the existence of parallel worlds called ‘The Theory of Everything’. Except, he explains to the baffled host, it’s not a novel. All of it is real.
Then we’re flashing back to 12 years before that testy TV appearance and a congress of physicists in an wintry Alpine hotel, where a younger Leinert, a Ph.D student with a promising paper to his name, soon picks up distinct vibes that not all is as it should be at the resort. Shadowy scarred men, missing scientists, unexpected avalanches, and, soon, a corpse add menace to the mystery. A beautiful young jazz pianist (Killing Eve’s Olivia Ross, channelling Anna Karina) knows a lot more about him than is seems possible.
You could be watching Spellbound in some smoky 1940s picturehouse
In German filmmaker Timm Kröger’s assured hands, all this plays like a journey of scientific discovery or a descent into madness – occasionally both at the same time – and his Hitchcockian style is story-enhancing rather than show-offy pastiche. The score channels Hitchcock’s composer Bernard Hermann to elegant effect, and the crisp black-and-white cinematography lends the hotel’s snowy surrounds a blinding dazzle and noirish shadows to its interiors. You could be watching Spellbound in some smoky 1940s picturehouse.
The Theory of Everything takes a cue or two from Chris Marker’s seminal New Wave noodle-twister La Jetée, too. But just as it seems to be clever clogs hard sci-fi that watching Oppenheimer twice prepared us for (and Robert Oppenheimer does get a hat-tip here), it steps back from the blackboard and turns swooningly romantic, charting the path of an impossible love across time and space. The ending may not come together quite as neatly as you’d hope, but it might be the most intimate multiverse movie ever made.
The Theory of Everything premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
