‘Chronovisor’ Review: An Eerie, Fiendishly Clever Mystery for Lovers of Libraries and the Storied Smell of Old Books

For anyone whose happy place is an old-school library reading room, all aged dark wood and green-and-gold reading lamps casting warm islands of light in the velvety murk, “Chronovisor” will be a near-fetishistic delight — even as it makes quite unhappy places of such hallowed havens of learning. The first feature by U.S. writer-directors Jack Auen and Kevin Walker builds on the studied lo-fi style of their well-regarded 2021 short “Marblehead,” doing an awful lot with very little as they fashion an ornate, occult-inflected sci-fi film from the pages of various yellowed academic volumes: not adapting them, let it be said, but reading them, and making us do the same, in ways that prove eerily atmospheric and surprisingly riveting.

A conversation-stoking standout at this year’s Rotterdam festival in January, now getting a limited U.S. theatrical release through Grasshopper Films, “Chronovisor” is an undeniably niche proposition, though it’s also easy to make the film sound more dustily recherché than it is. The prospect of a research-based mystery told heavily through text, which the film undeniably is, probably won’t get many people’s pulses racing. But add that it’s also a semi-factual inquiry bridging time-travel theory and Vatican conspiracies, with a side shot of Ivy League “Blair Witch” horror styling, and perhaps more viewers will be open to its weird, obsessive trickery. Either way, it’s the kind of wildly sui generis film made to foster its own fascinated, slow-growing cult — and puts Auen and Walker on the map as mischievous genre mixologists to watch.

Their devotion to knotty specifics of academia extends to casting a real-life academic — Anne-Laure Sellier, currently a professor of behavioral sciences at HEC Paris business school — in the lead. It’s a stunt that pays off in two ways: First, unlike in the vast majority of genre films set in the university realm, the film’s intellectual exchanges don’t sound hopelessly phony; and second, she has the nervous, recessive, slightly out-of-place quality necessary to set the story in motion. She plays Beatrice, a French scholar of philosophy and neuroscience at Columbia, introduced in conversation with another academic in a low-lit New York restaurant — an exchange of ideas that never blooms into personal chemistry, which seems to be the general way of things in her world.

She’s more at home, unsurprisingly, with her research papers and stacks of books, as she pursues an elusive breakthrough on the neurology of memory — in the process becoming fixated on the real-life history of the Chronovisor, an alleged 1970s invention of Italian Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti, that he outlandishly boasted could retrieve first-hand silent video from any point in the past, extending even to footage of Christ’s crucifixion. Though it was largely debunked as a hoax, Beatrice can’t quite let go of this curious lore, chasing and wheedling information out of various Ernetti-adjacent sources, until finally connecting with a European scientist who claims to have had a very real, mind-melting experience with the machine.

It’s all highly elaborate hokum that “Chronovisor” treats with deliciously tongue-in-cheek studiousness — Dan Brown dressed in the most elevated language of Umberto Eco. But while there’s a lurid thrill to the film’s ultimate revelations, drolly taken down a peg by the anticlimactically dingy aesthetic of VHS-era imagery, the film’s principal pleasures lie in the actual gathering of information: As Beatrice pores over forgotten leather-bound volumes, the salient words are illuminated and translated for the viewer’s edification, elegantly overlaid upon the filmed page — following the creases and curves of the paper — to precisely replicate the protagonist’s reading experience, so we share in her eureka moments along the way.

Rarely has a film so resourcefully evoked the transportive but decidedly analog thrill of reading; rarely has the warmly musty smell of research libraries and archives somehow wafted with such sense-memory precision off a cinema screen. “Chronovisor” is richly alive to the audiovisual tools of its own medium: Leo Zhang’s wonderfully tactile 16mm cinematography revels in the bleary glow of isolated lightbulbs late at night, winking through spilled-ink lakes of shadow, while the soundtrack wittily samples the grand orchestral mysticism of the late English composer Gustav Holst and the pompous kitsch of Gregorian chants. With this alternately silly, frightening, forward-looking and rampantly nostalgic puzzle piece, Auen and Walker show themselves to be in thrall to the printed word, and all the winding imaginative alleys it can lead you down — but they remain filmmakers first and foremost, and rather good ones at that.