The Universal Theory (2024)
Director: Timm Kröger Run Time: 118 min. Release Year: 2023 Language: German
Starring: Gottfried Breitfuß, Hanns Zischler, Jan Bülow, Olivia Ross, Philippe Graber
Country: Germany, Austria, Switzerland
Language: German, French, Italian, Swiss German, English
About the film:
World Premiere, 2023 Venice Film Festival. Set in 1962 at a quantum mechanics conference in an isolated lodge nestled amid the towering landscapes of the Swiss Alps, The Universal Theory (2024) is the story of a gifted young physicist, his curmudgeonly mentor, and an enigmatic jazz pianist who knows things about our wunderkind scientist that he’s never told another living soul.
German director Timm Kröger—himself also a cinematographer—films his tale with an eye for the majestic natural beauty that surrounds our characters, effectively evoking the paranoid postwar era.
“A black-and-white Hitchcockian multiverse time-meld.”
—Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International
About the filmmaker:
Born 1985 in Itzehoe, Germany. Studied at the European Film College in Ebeltoft, Denmark, then at Filmakademie BW in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Timm’s first feature and graduation film The Council of Birds (2014, orig, Zerrumpelt Herz) premiered in Venice in 2014 at the Settimana della Critica. Two collaborations as cinematographer with Sandra Wollner (The Trouble With Being Born (2020), The Impossible Picture (2016)). Since 2018, he has been part of The Barricades, a production company in Berlin together with Viktoria Stolpe. The Universal Theory (2024, orig. Die Theorie von Allem) is Timm’s debut feature as a writer and director.
See our upcoming films