Chron­i­cle

Thanks to a string of so-so hor­rors – includ­ing three over­hyped Para­nor­mal Activ­i­ties in as many years – the charms of the found footage sub­genre have start­ed to wear thin of late. Per­fect tim­ing, then, for some new blood to offer a fresh spin on POV filmmaking.

Chron­i­cle starts in duti­ful­ly for­mu­la­ic fash­ion: Angsty mis­fit Andrew (Dane DeHaan) decides to start record­ing his every wak­ing minute in a bid to both pro­tect him­self from his abu­sive, Bour­bon-breathed pop and to shun the high-school elite that has reject­ed him. Andrew’s cousin Matt (Alex Rus­sell) drags him to an ille­gal ware­house soirée on the promise of free-flow­ing suds and skirt, and while there the school’s res­i­dent Mr Pop­u­lar, Steve (Michael B Jor­dan), con­vinces them to come check out a mys­te­ri­ous sink hole (or is it a crash site?) in a near­by clear­ing. They go down togeth­er as boys and emerge as boys with total­ly badass super­nat­ur­al skillz.

With their new­found pow­ers of psy­choki­ne­sis our trio do what any right-mind­ed yoofs would in their sit­u­a­tion: lark around and play harm­less pranks on unsus­pect­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic. It’s at this point that 28-year-old first-time direc­tor Josh Trunk dis­tin­guish­es his film from the crowd, eschew­ing the kinds of irk­some shaky­cam tricks that would usu­al­ly sig­nal Clover­field syn­drome in favour of a smooth cin­e­mato­graph­ic style that’s explained by Andrew’s abil­i­ty to make his cam­era float around him. So not only does Chron­i­cle her­ald the com­ing of age of Gen­er­a­tion I, it also won’t give you a headache.

By draw­ing the audience’s atten­tion away from the cam­era at this junc­ture, Trunk casu­al­ly pro­ceeds to rein­vent the genre frame-by-frame. The gam­ble is that both the sto­ry and char­ac­ters are sud­den­ly thrust to the fore, but Max Lan­dis’ script and Trunk’s three charis­mat­ic leads more than hold their own.

As an occu­pa­tion­al haz­ard of deal­ing with teenagers, things take a petu­lant turn late on. Andrew’s moth­er is dying, his father is becom­ing increas­ing­ly sus­pi­cious of his son’s extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties, his so-called friends are only inter­est­ed in the cool­er, more con­fi­dent Andrew 2.0. It’s all get­ting a bit much. But how­ev­er volatile things get in the film’s last act, Trunk shows enough restraint to ensure the action is grip­ping with­out ever becom­ing overblown or silly.

Unfavourable com­par­isons with NBC’s flash-in-the-pan super hero fol­ly Heroes are hard to ignore, but despite the lim­it­less capa­bil­i­ties of its pro­tag­o­nists, Chron­i­cle nev­er stretch­es itself too thin. Only a crud­dy sac­cha­rine end­ing spoils this oth­er­wise fast and frol­ic­some sci-fi thriller.