Chronovisor

Late-night New York library research has never looked as seductive as it does in Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s elegantly assembled, deeply chilling and cerebral horror on technology that can destabilise identity and open a portal between the living and the dead.

Beatrice Courte, a chic and obsessive French academic (played by actual professor of behavioural sciences Anne-Laure Sellier) is seeking proof of the rumoured invention and subsequent theft of the Chronovisor, a device for storing and replaying the complete collective memory of humankind. Over-exposure to it is said to ruin minds. Father Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine monk and musicologist who created the machine alongside twelve physicists, claimed to have seen the Crucifixion of Christ through it, before he vanished and the Vatican suppressed the machine and all its traces.

Shot on gorgeously textured 16mm and weaving in an assemblage of actual text on the mystery, this is a romantic homage to analogue methods and a time before search engines promised access to arcane secrets, as much as it is a fitting parable for our era of all-consuming virtual realms.

– Carmen Gray