‘The Theory Of Everything’ Review: A Weirdly Elusive Dive Into The Multiverse – Venice Film Festival

deadline.com:

Thanks to science fiction, we all have a basic grip on the theory of the multiverse: the idea that there are innumerable parallel worlds in which the chances and choices of the past – the roads not taken, whether by ourselves or the dinosaurs – have split off into alternative stories, endlessly bifurcating into other pasts, other futures that must be peopled, most provocatively, with other versions of ourselves.

It is an idea that has proved rich pickings for comic-book adventures, where peril can come from any available universe and there is always a chance of confronting a doppelganger, but German director Timm Kröger has returned to the theory – which dates back to the 1950s – to explore how mysterious, sinister and terrifyingly vast a proposal it really is.

This is a theory of everything where everything – that familiar word – is infinite. Where nothing, in fact, is ever going to be “everything.” The Theory of Everything (Die Theorie von Allem) is set in the Swiss Alps in winter, a backdrop of silent whiteness that gives an immediate sense of another world.

Johannes Leinert (Jan Bülow) has come from modest circumstances  – a widowed mother, a small village – to work on a doctoral thesis with the unrelentingly severe Dr Julius Strathen (Hanns Zischler), despite his supervisor’s contempt for his central theory which he dismisses as “mere metaphysics.” When master and student travel together to a physics conference in Switzerland, Johannes finds an initially more sympathetic ear in Strathen’s old academic sparring partner Professor Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss), an affable drunk whose intellectual brilliance is overshadowed by his clumsy manners.