Chronovisor Review: Library-Set Sci-Fi Mystery Debuts From Auen — SkimNews
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- Jack Auen and Kevin Walker released their debut feature "Chronovisor," building on their 2021 short "Marblehead" with an occult-inflected sci-fi film that bridges time-travel theory and Vatican conspiracies
- The film premiered as a standout at January's Rotterdam festival and is now getting a limited U.S. theatrical release through Grasshopper Films
- Anne-Laure Sellier, a real-life HEC Paris behavioral sciences professor, stars as Beatrice, a French scholar of philosophy and neuroscience at Columbia investigating the alleged 1970s Chronovisor invention
- The film's central lore revolves around Italian Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti's debunked claim that his machine could retrieve silent video footage from any point in history, including Christ's crucifixion
- Cinematographer Leo Zhang shot on 16mm, while the film's distinctive technique overlays translated text from leather-bound volumes onto filmed pages to replicate the protagonist's reading experience
Why it matters: By casting a working academic and building the film's visual language around the analog act of reading rather than exposition, Auen and Walker have carved out an unusually niche but craft-forward theatrical release — the kind of sui generis title likely to find a slow-growing cult rather than mainstream audiences, but one that signals two filmmakers to watch in genre hybrid territory.
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