It’s a tall tale out of a Borges story, the wildest conspiracy theory you’ve never heard. In the 1960s, Italian Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented a machine that allowed one to see and photograph the past. A contraption made of cathode rays, mysterious metals, and all kinds of strange antennae, the “chronovisor” didn’t exactly send you back in time but captured and displayed ancient events like a kind of paranormal television. Together with the twelve scientists who allegedly helped him build it—a gang that was rumored to have included Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and former Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun—Ernetti “saw” and documented some astonishing happenings, from the founding of the Roman Empire to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Or so he said. Defying a vow to keep mum about the invention—at the behest of none other than Pope Pius XII, apparently—the monk eventually spilled the beans, and a number of articles cropped up in Italian newspapers throughout the 1970s, equal-parts intrigued by the clergyman and determined to debunk his concoction as an urban myth. Was it? Shortly before he died, in 1994, Ernetti wrote a letter reiterating that the chronovisor was real. He claimed Pope Pius XII had forbidden him from talking about it because he feared the device would annihilate humanity. And he vowed that the Vatican, instead of destroying the whole thing, had only hidden it.
Truth or hoax, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker know this is fodder for endless and irresistible speculations, and their terrific feature debut, Chronovisor, treats the titular machine as something between a holy grail and a black hole gobbling up anyone intersecting its orbit. In its simplest terms, this is the story of Béatrice Courte, an academic—played by real-life scholar Anne Laure Sellier—who stumbles into a passing reference to the device and becomes obsessed with tracking it down. But Chronovisor plays as a kind of ghost story—not just because the object kicking it in motion remains largely invisible, but because its frames reverberate with intimations of mysteries. Everything from the caliginous lighting to the grainy textures—the film was shot in warm, low-lit Super 16mm by Leo Zhang—suggests a universe perched somewhere between the realms of the living and the dead.
This isn’t the first time Auen and Walker have embraced the occult. Their 2021 short, Marblehead, followed a man who lived inside a cemetery; 2025’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, co-directed by Walker and Irene Zahariadis, dogged a few old residents of a remote Greek village as they ferried the remains of their ancestors to a mausoleum. But what’s distinctive and ultimately so romantic about Chronovisor is the importance Auen and Walker attribute to the act of reading: here’s a film convinced that the secret to the most extraordinary story never told won’t emerge through online searches but nights spent at the library crouched over books.
If the suggestion sounds a tad anachronistic, that’s because the whole film is. Ostensibly set in the present, Chronovisor keeps jamming your temporal bearings. Save for the occasional smartphone, the “action,” such as it is, unfolds in a world frozen in time (when Béatrice tries to contact one of Ernetti’s surviving relatives, it isn’t an email she sends but a typed letter). The focus gradually moves from the academic-turned-detective toward the media she consults: we hear recordings of a lecture Ernetti gave about his creation, watch old TV footage concerning the man and others who sought to communicate with the dead, but mostly we read. Chronovisor is so enamored with the written word that close-ups of books and articles comprise most of its runtime—with English translations of their various languages dished out not as subtitles but placed directly over the original text on the page. There’s nothing precious about the choice: Auen and Walker want you to read along with Béatrice, and what’s so fascinating about their film is the way it tries to combine two different art forms (literature and cinema) and different actions (reading and watching) all while adjusting its pace to the time needed to perform both.
Chronovisor—“an armchair mystery,” per its writers-directors—is almost impertinent in the way it requires its 21st-century, chronically online audience to give their undivided attention to something as outwardly static as a printed page. But nothing about it is ever truly inert—certainly not the moments when Zhang turns to tomes and newspaper clippings. That so much of Chronovisor should consists of written words is because the film is almost defiantly certain that these are the ultimate repository of secrets, all the more so one as incredible as Ernetti’s. And so convincing is that belief that you might catch yourself squinting throughout lest you should miss some clues, so that when the story suddenly moves from libraries and into the streets of New York City—or when Zhang trades a close-up for a wider shot—the overall effect is one of vertigo. It is a small wonder that Auen and Walker should succeed in turning scholarly research into the stuff of a thriller; it is a much bigger one that their erudite film should convey the discombobulating power of its ideas, and the dizzying effect that comes from bringing those out of a library—or a movie theatre—and into the world.
Does it matter if Ernetti made it all up? If the chronovisor was just a hoax, would this story and attendant film be any less startling? Hardly. Because as Béatrice’s quest unfurls, Chronovisor stretches into something far bigger than a portrait of an impossible invention. It becomes a film about conspiracies, about the spell that stories like this can conjure in a world that leaves precious little room for the unexplainable. In a work that’s pitched along the nebulous border between fact and fiction, nothing in Chronovisor is as magical as the power Auen and Walker bestow on books, and nothing more exhilarating than the belief this film insinuates in those willing to adjust to its strange, hypnotic rhythms—that there are secrets and mysteries everywhere around you. You just need to know where to look and what to ask.
Chronovisor premiered at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam.