Chronovisor Is The Year’s Most Absorbing — and Unusual — Mystery
The Da Vinci Code meets Tenet in this odd and appealingly literate mystery-thriller hybrid.
Chronovisor is the kind of work that has you asking, “what is a movie, anyway?” It’s shot and edited as a film, full of exquisitely grainy 16mm visuals of star Anne-Laure Sellier (a real-life academic and researcher) settling in to Gothic reading rooms and walking the chilly streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side after dark. But a significant portion of that footage also consists of long, unbroken shots of Sellier reading or listening to old cassette tapes that aren’t completely still— people shift in their chairs and make subtle faces as they process information — but are close. And yet, this film is absolutely spellbinding.
At times, Chronovisor plays like an audio drama, or maybe an old-school text-based computer game where you take on the character of Béatrice (Sellier), a philosophy professor who thinks that she may have stumbled onto a secret that could change the course of history. (Or has she?) The action takes place in the viewer’s mind, in other words, as Béatrice follows a trail of recorded lectures and vintage Italian magazines in search of the truth about Father Pellegrino Ernetti, an Italian Benedictine monk who claimed to have invented a device that could see into the past.
As one might expect given his invention’s awesome power, using this so-called “Chronovisor” — a makeshift contraption that looks like a stack of analog TVs with dozens of antennas poking out of them — is said to have driven Ernetti insane. He retreated from public life sometime in the mid-’70s, after admitting that an image of Jesus Christ that he supposedly channeled through the Chronovisor was actually a hoax. (Or was it?) Decades later, Béatrice is determined to find him, even if it comes at the expense of her own sanity.
Remarkably, Father Ernetti was a real person. Bur although it incorporates a treasure trove of authentic books, magazines, newspaper articles, photographs, VHS tapes, and other archival sources, Chronovisor is very much not a documentary. It merely uses the truth as a foundation upon which to build its eerie analog nightmare fuel, as directors Jack Auen and Kevin Walker spin a tale of scientific intrigue that combines the Catholic conspiracies of The Da Vinci Code with a high-concept time-travel plot reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.
Eventually, Béatrice’s obsession takes her out of the library and into the real world, leading to a glitchy, distorted video-art finale that’s one of the creepiest and most unsettling things I’ve seen all year. Auen and Walker show great restraint leading up to this moment, relying largely on on-screen text and audio recordings to tell the story of Ernetti and his co-conspirators — a sinister group made up of of Vatican insiders and ex-Nazi scientists. Even those haunting final images are enigmatic, relying on the viewer to imagine their terrifying context.
But what makes Chronovisor truly unusual is that, despite all of this, it’s completely gripping from beginning to end. It helps that the story is fascinating, of course. It also helps that this movie is so unusual, both in form and content. But Auen and Walker’s thoughtful filmmaking is what really makes it stand out: The graphic-design choices in this movie tell a story all by themselves, for example, and the soundtrack, composed entirely of music by 19th-century composer Gustav Holst, wordlessly establishes the protagonist’s elite academic world.
Chronovisor captures the thrill of going to a library and opening up a book to the exact page that has the exact information that you’ve been searching for — a rare and refined sensation that’s like nothing else. Neither is this movie.
