‘Zero’ sum game

D IRECTOR Terry Gilliam’s nearly 20-year streak of bad movies remains unbroken with “The Zero Theorem,” yet another project whose narrative gets swallowed by its design.

A lonely, repressed hacker (Christoph Waltz) living in an abandoned church is trying to crack an absurdly complicated algorithm called the Zero Theorem while being bothered by a floozy (Mélanie Thierry) and a precocious teen (an annoying Lucas Hedges). Matt Damon and Tilda Swinton have small roles as a nefarious corporate titan and an online shrink.

The conception of the world outside the church — an Orwell-inflected “Idiocracy” — is a classic Gilliam retro-future vision. It’s a grimy dazzle of candycolored funhouse grotesqueries in which targeted commercials follow citizens around and an amusingly vast jumble of signs seems to ban every conceivable activity. Those pictograph signs are so funny (one seems to forbid high heels, another frolicking) that you’ll barely be paying attention to the conversation that goes on in front of them, and that’s pure Gilliam, too. He’s a designer more than a storyteller, and he’d be better off sticking to music videos or commercials, where a stock of cool images is all you need.

Though it livens up at the end, most of “Zero” has the pondwater stasis of many Gilliam films, including “Brazil,” to which this film is a virtual sequel or outgrowth. That marvelous-looking but endless film was one of the first signs that Gilliam would turn out to be among the most disappointing directors of his era.