Quirky film that's oddly good
JOSH Trank’s directorial debut Chronicle is strange little movie, poised somewhere between Jackass and an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Three slightly goofy high-school boys (Andrew, Matt, and Scott) wander away from a party to investigate a mysterious hole in the ground. Inside they discover an equally mysterious glowing crystal, which induces some quite spectacular nosebleeds before leaving them unconscious. On wakening, the boys discover that they have the ability to move objects with the power of their minds.
So far, so much like an old episode of Night Gallery. For a time the boys enjoy mucking about with their new found powers, moving cars, baseballs, Lego blocks, and leaf-blowers to look up girls skirts. They occasionally have nosebleeds (the universally acknowledged cinema short-hand for psychic powers), but otherwise all seems fine.
Trouble looms, however, when Andrew, a loner with a difficult home life, starts to act out with his powers, using them to vent the frustration and anger he feels towards the world.
On the positive side, Chronicle has all the charms of a movie made with a small budget ($15m being a mere pittance in modern film-making). The economies needed in special effects and other technical aspects of the production are ingeniously accommodated by shooting in a hand-held style, while a sharp and engaging script focuses attention on the characters. The early scenes are probably the most pleasurable, with the hapless trio’s pranks and misadventures feeling sweetly affectionate.
Things start to loose focus in the later scenes. The hand-held approach, such a boon in the initial scenes, starts to hamstring the production when the action gets bigger and more complicated. We get lots of rather clunky opening lines in scenes where the presence of the camera has to be justified, with characters rather mechanically saying things like “Oh, we need to film this for a police investigation”, or “Do you mind if I film you? It’s for my blog”.
Furthermore, the scriptwriting, so refreshingly natural in the first act, becomes rather ham-fisted as Trank tries to carve out a traditional tragic arc. At one point Matt says to his friends: “I think this may have been the best day of my life”, and later, in a soliloquy to Andrew, “I think things are going to get better for you from now on”.
Back in the days when I used to watch trashy soap-operas, statements like this were known as “tragedy words”, and always augured a fall into oblivion. So it transpires in Chronicle, with the very next act depicting Andrew’s descent into a sort of egomaniacal madness. This sort of crude structuring of the plot felt like a distraction to me, and in the later scenes I longed to get back to the relaxed style that characterised the start of the film.
Still, for a first piece of work this is an enjoyable and frequently impressive effort. Trank is clearly an intelligent and ingenious film-maker, and one hopes that this first film will have provided a learning experience upon which he can draw in the future.
Rating: ***
