From the Vault #33: CHRONICLE (2012)
From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.
This one is from February 16th, 2014…
As inevitable as the setting sun, eventually two of cinema’s most recent obsessions–the found footage and superhero genres–were destined to collide, yet no one surely predicted in such a strong manner as Chronicle.
Josh Trank’s compact, relatively low budget blend of handheld camerawork and the superhero (or should that be villain?) origin story blasts out of nowhere as a remarkably assured piece of work, telling a story that has it’s roots in decades of comic-book lore while being entirely original, and managing to utilise the found footage gimmick in order to tell a character story that starts casually and builds to a gripping climax.
The simple fact is Trank’s film probably shouldn’t have been this good.
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