Jered Mabaquiao
Anyone who has been swept away in a current of intellectual pursuit can identify with Chronovisor’s appeal. At least for me, I intimately recognize the kind of frightening intellectual work and mindful interiority that Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor illustrates. Chronovisor begins with the professional, and oftentimes rare, virtue of attention—with the conviction that one more source, one more language, one more archival detour, or at least one more listening ear at a dinner table might finally cohere an argument.
Between our own passions and our own attention spans, Chronovisor’s horror infuses a hubris of intellect with an occult machine that can replay and access the past. In this way, I read the film’s most unsettling discovery that “scholarship” can become a feverish, even deeply spiritually possessive narrative arc. Chronovisor frames this fever in the research professor whose funding will have been cut off if they cannot miraculously conjure a mythological machine whose sole function is to capture and bridge anyone’s consciousness and to project it as an image onto its screen.
Check out the trailer for Chronovisor:
Auen and Walker’s feature debut follows Béatrice Courte (Anne-Laure Sellier), a French academic whose research into the philosophy and neuroscience of memory leads her to the story of Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine monk who claimed to have developed a device capable of reproducing images from the past, including the crucifixion of Christ. The premise is a combination of a historical record, a divinely inspired hoax, and government conspiracy. As the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s synopsis puts it, Béatrice’s seductive research begins to carry her “beyond the realms of the possible,” with consequences for her scholarly standing. Between Courte’s disciplined inquiry, we move into an inquiry that disciplines her (as well as the audience) which seems especially relevant to the age of the GenAI tech race.
The film’s formal elements are inseparable and difficult to unread in the technological landscape of artificial intelligence, large language models, and machine learning. To be exposed to a machine (the chronovisor in this case) that is capable of going beyond what is deemed possible, accessing a techno-animism, is to literally have almost unfettered access to the realm of language, image, and “thought,” as a contemporary extension to LLM’s. The film’s techno-animism lies in its fantasy that information is never truly dead: texts, images, voices, and historical consciousness merely wait for the proper apparatus to make them speak again.
This fantasy of frictionless access is difficult to separate from our present encounter with generative AI, even if the technologies themselves are radically different. This animism in Chronovisor, at times, is a strength-training, and stamina building exercise for Courte and, indeed, asks viewers to participate in a version of the “life of the mind.”
In this way, fantasies of technology and the film’s narrative invite a kind of seduction, as a closing of distances between question and answer, archive and interpretation, suggesting that proximities might finally be overcome by the proper machine. What makes Chronovisor frightening is precisely this collapse of access into knowledge—the assumption that because something can be retrieved, reproduced, or synthesized, it has therefore been understood.
Ostensibly, as the rabbit hole deepens, Courte reads – and the movie demands that we read with her. Reading consequently should not be perceived as an interruption of cinematic action so much as the film’s primary mode of suspense. Wilson Chapman’s IndieWire review describes books, magazines, newspapers, VHS tapes, and audio recordings as the film’s genuine archival materials; passages appear before us in translation, with selected words illuminated as if the page itself were revealing a secret. Guy Lodge, writing for Variety, emphasizes how the text follows the creases and curves of the paper, replicating the protagonist’s reading experience. In Chronovisor, thought itself is action, atmosphere, and suspense.
The image and sound design extend this conflict between present-tense labor and historical seduction. The film was shot on warm, low-lit 16mm, and its libraries become spaces where contemporary research takes on the glow of an earlier technological age. IndieWire and Variety both note the use of music associated with Gustav Holst, a grand, almost cosmic counterweight to the intimate activity of reading. The imagery of a lone scholar at a desk seems to be handling forces larger than the institution as the growing object of knowledge bleeds into the room through typography, voice, grain, and repetition.
It’s this aesthetic choice that also makes the film unusually precise about the seductions of academic life. Perhaps even more so, it’s this seduction of going beyond an intellectual boundary that also shapes audiences’ sensibilities in the age of Gen AI. The Chronovisor eliminates historical distance. Generative AI systems similarly appear to eliminate the distances separating reader, archive, language, synthesis, and answer. Both can therefore encourage the fantasy that knowledge is a problem of access rather than interpretation.
In one way, Courte’s archive promises the familiar and ethical procedure: gather evidence, compare accounts, identify patterns, revise the claim. Yet the Chronovisor story is built from the breakdown of these assurances. Every document may clarify the history, but every clarification opens another dispute about authenticity, suppression, translation, or motive. The more Courte learns, the less stable the object of knowledge becomes. The horror is therefore inverted and doubled: the Chronovisor may be a fraud, but Courte’s compulsion is real. Whether the machine exists matters less than her inability to stop pursuing it. Courte has been professionally trained to produce another question, another source, another interpretive possibility.
Chronovisor builds suspense out of the materials a scholar can actually touch: old books, reproduced documents, voices, screens, and the hard pressed labor of sorting one claim from another. In a conversation with Tone Glow, the directors describe becoming obsessed with the Chronovisor story while trying to find a budget-conscious way to make its research cinematic. They say the volume of text was fundamental to the concept and they acknowledge that this would be a movie that audiences would have to read. This close reading interaction shapes production in material ways because the film’s apparent austerity is not an obstacle it transcends.
The filmmakers’ own academic proximity gives the experiment an additional charge. Anne-Laure Sellier is a professor of behavioral sciences at HEC Paris, while Auen and Walker told Tone Glow that they sought a real academic who could inhabit multilingual speech and specialized language. Sellier’s presence makes Courte’s intellectual life and authority simultaneously credible and fragile.
Courte knows how to pursue a difficult question, but the film keeps asking whether scholarly expertise can protect her from the desire to be right—or from an even worse desire to disregard one’s own ethics for the pursuit of occult knowledge. For most intents and purposes, this is why Chronovisor feels more disturbing than its conspiracy premise might suggest. And so a new question emerges: when does the desire to know becomes indistinguishable from the desire to persist without any restraint?
Academic anxiety is often described as fear of inadequacy: not having read enough, not being original enough, not being certain enough. Chronovisor sharpens this real, lived, fear into a supernatural and technologically haunted logic. There is always another source, another testimony, another hidden institutional history, another conversation to be had, another prompt to push us. Under this logic, the boundary between intellectual discipline and intellectual indulgence becomes increasingly difficult to locate.
What begins as scholarship becomes haunting because the mind that insists on making meaning has no reliable way of knowing when it is finished. The film’s achievement is to make this condition formally and even aesthetically contagious. By asking us to follow Béatrice through the archives, Chronovisor turns distant spectators into provisional researchers – filled with anxieties, almost aching for that next highlighted phrase while becoming increasingly suspicious of the last one.
Jered Mabaquiao (he/him) is a Filipino-American, PhD Candidate in the English department at the University of Texas at Arlington. He also teaches rhetoric and composition, and American literature classes at Dallas College. Jered also serves as an executive board member for the Dallas Asian American Historical Society which works on building Asian American communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Previously a fellow for the Crossing Latinidades research initiative, Jered works broadly on projects interrogating racial melancholia, identity, and trauma in racialized narratives. His current project underscores political and financial economies, psychosocial politics, and popular culture in Asian American entertainment media. He has previously published for Horror Homeroom on Undertone, Hannah Whitten’s upcoming novel, Reliquary and Curry Barker’s Obsession.
