I watched this in the independent cinema on the 7th of January, 2025.
It’s a sci-fi mystery, set in the Swiss Alps in the 60s, and it centres on a young Physics PhD candidate who travels with his supervisor to a congress in a remote mountaintop hotel. He’s working on a Universal Theory, which is essentially a plot device for introducing a parallel-worlds theme. At the hotel, things seem…off. He meets a lady who knows things about him she shouldn’t; people develop strange scabs and scars; and, of course, the deaths begin.
As science-y movies go, it’s actually really good! The multiversal theory is not waffled or mysticised, and they clearly got someone who knew what they were doing to write the props like the draft thesis - the quantum mechanics were plausible, with gaps in just the right places.
More than that, the atmosphere created is startlingly surreal and threatening. It’s shot in black and white, giving the mountains and scenery a stark, deathly feel, and the stills come with the attendant chiaroscuro and beauty that’s lost in higher fidelity.
What I particularly liked is the lack of hand-holding. At no point is there any exposition or explanation. The strange events are left to pile up, until you start seeing patterns and explanations. It’s presented as an off-kilter story, half-finished, doubtful and incomplete, which is a masterstroke by the creators because to do that requires mastery, and they pull it off very well.
It was a little long, but I very much liked it.