Review: 'Chronovisor' invites a woozy deep dive into the mysteries of pseudo-science

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Set us as preferred A researcher falls down a rabbit hole of academia in “Chronovisor,” a singular indie that sneaks up on you.Filmmakers Jack Auen and Kevin Walker — who operate under the name Cosmic Salon — make movies in the belief that intellectual pursuits can be both exciting and cinematic.

“Chronovisor,” a pleasurably hand-crafted curio, firmly asserts that the sensorial possibilities of film can seem infinite.That said, the movie opens deceptively: Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier), a professor of philosophy at Columbia in New York, is clearly boring her two unseen colleagues over drinks with a monologue about her theories of memory and brain function.Alone afterward, however, with the camera following her as if she were a secret agent and the orchestral swell of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” lending Hitchcockian tension, the real story begins to unfold in large, ornate libraries.What draws Béatrice’s attention is a fantastical claim made by a Benedictine monk in an Italian magazine article from the 1970s.

He insists he discovered an instrument with the power to pull images and sound from the whole of human history, presenting them on a television screen.With this time-shaping device called the Chronovisor, Father Pellegrino Ernetti professed to have seen footage of the crucified Christ and even enjoyed a lost play staged by an ancient Roman dramatist.

At the end of a slow zoom shot, we see the article’s title in Italian until it’s translated for us in English: “A Machine Has Been Invented That Photographs the Past.” Movies From a new “Resident Evil” reboot from the director of “Weapons” to Oscar contenders starring Mikey Madison and Tom Cruise, here are the movies we’ll be at this fall.With that, “Chronovisor” and its obsessed protagonist enter a trancelike, analog-heavy state in which obscure texts in myriad languages tease a concealed parascientific history o...