Terry Gilliam’s THE ZERO THEOREM: To Break the Human Spirit

This is another journey into the future by Terry Gilliam. The director’s work is bursting with ideas, jokes, and references. Some hit the mark, some don’t. The Zero Theorem is related to Brazil by the same creator, but this time it is corporations and technological progress that join forces to break the human spirit.

A neurotic mathematician, hacker – Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), a protagonist like many in Gilliam’s films, lives in an Orwellian world, likely of the near future. He waits alone in his dwelling, which is an old church. He hopes to receive one day a phone call that will explain the metaphysical meaning of his own existence.

And so he sinks deeper and deeper into isolation and the barrenness of being, occupying his time by working for his boss – Management (Matt Damon). His responsibilities consist of calculating successive mathematical equations using an elaborate console and a chair with pedals – the work station resembles an old arcade machine.

With time, he receives the assignment of proving the titular theorem. Under the watchful eye of Big Brother he is to discover the meaning of human existence, or more precisely, its lack of meaning. Zero is to equal 100%, everything means nothing.

Futuristic London is chaos flooded with intense, glaring colors, but also with grayness, filth, and darkness. Fashion and interior design are a collage of steampunk and tacky rave aesthetics, created with attention to the smallest details. Loud advertisements shout from the streets, one of them encouraging one to join the Church of Batman the Redeemer, and ever more bizarre figures wander everywhere.

As the director himself says, The Zero Theorem was made with the lowest budget of his long career. All the more gratifying that the set designers, costume designers, and animators did solid work. One senses a bit of improvisation and makeshift solutions that nonetheless form a fully realized futuristic universe.

Bald-shaven Qohen Leth, whose name is not accidentally reminiscent of the biblical Koheleth, who in his book reflects on the meaning of existence, is portrayed by Waltz with class. He is the only character in the film played seriously. On his path toward completing the final calculation, he encounters successive people who hinder him.

The grotesque psychologist (Tilda Swinton), who is a computer program; Leth’s superior, the overly enthusiastic Joby (David Thewlis) with an absurd (like everyone here) hairstyle; Management’s talkative son Bob (Lucas Hedges); and the escort-service girl Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry), who struggles with her loyalty toward the protagonist.

Contact with her results in an even deeper descent into depression and schizophrenia for Qohen, who already refers to himself in the plural. The pair conduct their romance by plugging into the Matrix through outfits that are a variation on medieval jester costumes. All acting performances, except Waltz’s, are caricatured and exaggerated, in the bad sense of those words.

The film attempts to touch on something deeper through a story about mental illness and building isolating walls around oneself in a world of corporations and advanced technology. It is a dramatic fairy tale in which order collides with chaos and nihilism, but nothing emerges from it.

Gilliam offers us an interesting auteur concept, but cannot develop it; no moral flows from it. There is a lack of coherence such as one finds in the creator’s earlier productions. By too often veering into slapstick, he ruins the whole, which remains uneven.

It is like the cybernetic blocks that Leth assembles. Everything works together, but only up to a point, because eventually it collapses. The Zero Theorem is Gilliam’s downfall — fortunately he does it on his own terms and with style.