Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Vertiginous German-language mind-scrambler The Universal Theory is one of a kind — a visually dazzling retro exercise in paranoid Alpine sci-fi noir. It’s rather as if Philip K Dick had rewritten Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and left Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles to argue over who could bring it to the screen more stylishly.Directed and co-written by Timm Kröger, the film is in black and white, apart from a prelude in colour depicting a 1970s TV chat show, with agitated guest Johannes (Jan Bülow) protesting that his newly published novel is not actually fiction, but a faithful account of strange events in the Swiss mountains. We then jump back 12 years to Johannes as a gauche young doctoral student visiting a physics congress; he is accompanying his supervisor (Hanns Zischler, imperiously sour), who dismisses his pupil’s theories as “esoteric babble”. What happens to Johannes up among the slopes and chalets is an eerie affair of disappearances and doppelgängers, as he falls for mysterious pianist Karin (Olivia Ross) and attracts the attentions of two sinister policemen (one of them played by David Bennent, who played the prodigiously screaming Oskar in 1979’s The Tin Drum).Shot by Roland Stuprich (Kröger is himself a former cinematographer), the film is a marvel of period pastiche: the chiaroscuro is densely menacing, while outdoors among glistening snow, the enigmas are all the murkier for being exposed to the pitiless clarity of Alpine daylight. This is a transfixingly ingenious entertainment, and an exceptionally beautiful one — with a majestically lush score by Diego Ramos Rodríguez, channelling both Mahler and 1940s Hollywood thriller scores. Kröger’s film bears a distant family resemblance to German Netflix sci-fi series Dark, but it is entirely its own exotically original thing. Catch it while it is on the big screen, where its widescreen brilliance truly flourishes.★★★★★In UK cinemas from December 13
