Kevin Walker and Jack Auen's modest but ingenious debut finds more cinematic tension than you'd have ever thought possible in filming walls of text.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
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Courtesy of Grasshopper Film 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.
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