Create a 10-word scroll-stopping headline for: The Movie Filmed in Durham Nobody Knows About: ‘Everything & The Universe’ | Vibe NC

Seventeen minutes into the offbeat indie rom-com Everything & the Universe, a woman walks into a hotel to check in for a weekend stay. The hotel lobby is bright and airy, with a wall of glass windows near the reception desk and a cream-and-crimson carpet underfoot.

It was here that my sister-in-law, Annie, watching the film last month after randomly encountering it on Amazon Prime, felt a click of recognition. She hit pause and Googled: Indeed, the lobby was that of The Durham Hotel.

As it turns out, Everything & the Universe—in which a man and a woman meet en route to the same wedding and realize they’re both in love with the bride—was filmed largely in Durham. It’s also explicitly set here, as opposed to representing an anonymous Southern city: Characters argue over fries at the Federal, shop for suit jackets at Dolly’s, and swivel in salon chairs at Moshi Moshi, among gathering at nearly a dozen other local spots.

The movie has been streaming on Amazon and Apple TV+ since last year. But there’s been no local press about it, and when I began asking around, few Durhamites knew it had been released—including some of the business owners whose spaces it features.

Erin Karcher owns the downtown bar Arcana, where some 20 minutes of the film are set. Everything & the Universe depicted the bar true to life, down to the tarot readings, queer clientele, and its ambiguously pronounced name (characters debate whether it’s “Ar-canna” or “Ar-cah-na”).

Karcher recalled the shoot happening back in 2022 but didn’t realize the movie was out, or that it was a proper feature, until I emailed her to ask about it. She watched it almost immediately and loved it.

“Nobody knows about this, and they should. It’s delightful,” Karcher said. “It’s so Durham.”

Indeed, unlike the last notable film to feature a modern Bull City backdrop—the 2010 flop Main Street, which depicted Durham, anachronistically, as an emphysemic boondocks wheezing from the collapse of the tobacco industry—Everything & the Universe has an uncanny grasp on the city in which it’s set.

Watching it felt, at times, like watching scenes I’d witnessed around town beat for beat, from the dialogue (“Fascists!” one character yells, when it appears the Durham Hotel has fumbled a booking) to the antics (smoking weed atop the parking deck that overlooks the neon Old Bull sign) and soundtrack (Wye Oak, Big Thief).

Everything & the Universe also captures Durham’s sometimes contradictory identity as a Southern industrial town remade into a secular hub for science and culture. The female protagonist, Jane (Nicolette Pearse), is a chainsmoking scientist—equal parts Lucky Strike and RTP—whose rationalism walls her off from frivolous meaning-making but also from omens she’d do well to notice; she’s nicknamed Cancer for…