‘Chronovisor’ Trailer: Vatican Conspiracy and Time Travel Turn Academic Research Into a Thrillingly Freaky Brain Tease

Filmmakers Kevin Walker and Jack Auen dig into Vatican history to craft this shoestring but highly effective academic conspiracy thriller about a supposed occult device that can photograph the distant past.

Enough hours spent in the stacks, and you’ll start to feel freaked out, too.

Filmmakers Kevin Walker and Jack Auen (aka Cosmic Salon) turn academic research into a terrifying project with their docufiction debut feature film “Chronovisor,” which first premiered at Rotterdam at the top of this year. Also a New Directors/New Films selection, it’s part metatext, part Vatican conspiracy theory, and fully an existential thriller that disintegrates into Bill-Morrison-meets-Alex-Garland levels of indescribably unsettling visual chaos. IndieWire exclusively debuts the trailer below ahead of the film’s September release.

A brainy, post-doctorate spin on historical science-fiction, “Chronovisor” adapts documented 20th-century lore in 16mm and in New York City, focusing on a polyglot academic researcher down a hole of parascience and through reams of archival text: specifically into an obsession over a makeshift device that, once belonging to Vatican clergy, allegedly can allow viewers to watch the past (such as Jesus’ crucifixion) on a small TV screen. And much of the film unfolds as text displayed on the screen, with Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier) poring over decades of historical documents that the filmmakers translate for us. As much a literary detective story for English majors as it is a chilling slice of time-travel weirdness, “Chronovisor” is one of the year’s most bewitchingly weird (and best) movies.

More from the film’s official synopsis: “While writing a monograph on historical theories of memory, Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier), a respected academic, becomes beguiled by the allegedly true story of the Chronovisor, an occult device said to reproduce visuals from any point in history on a TV screen. Her obsession with the mysterious machine drags her from her Upper East Side apartment through the depths of New York City’s hidden libraries, to the edge of a breakthrough.”

Plus, here’s what IndieWire contributor Vadim Rizov wrote out of Rotterdam: “As with any good time travel narrative, there are unexpected, sinister ramifications to this discovery: Vatican secrecy and ominous disappearances swirl around a narrative that, for much of the film, simply consists of Sellier sitting and reading esoteric texts in multiple languages. All of these texts have been printed and laid-out in shots that showcase the variety of fonts and paper stocks used. It’s a work of rigorous textual fetishism, shot on 16mm and appropriately devoted to analogue pleasures, all the way to an ending that takes the film out of the library and into a mysterious realm of video art.”

Fun fact: Sellier is an actual academic, serving as a professor of behavioral science at HEC Paris, with research into perception, creativity, and cognitive biases.

Meanwhile, Film at Lincoln Center in New York has slated a series of films starting August 28 in spirit of “Chronovisor”: “Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor” includes screenings of Howard Hawks’ “Ball of Fire,” Jacques Tourneur’s “Curse of the Demon,” Peter Medak’s “The Changeling,” a 70mm presentation of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” and more films. The August 28-September 5 series, per FLC, “traces the many ways artists have transformed the taciturn labor of reading and research into cinema.”

“Chronovisor” opens at Film at Lincoln Center in New York courtesy of Grasshopper Film starting Friday, September 4, with a rollout to follow.