Chronicle | Film review

Most superhero stories are power fantasies—the wish-fulfillment daydreams of omegas pining to be alphas. That subtext becomes text with Chronicle, which applies a mock-doc shooting style to the story of three high-school students—a camera-toting outcast, his wanna-be-philosopher cousin and a class-president hopeful—who crawl down into what looks like a UFO crash site and emerge with telekinetic abilities. At first, it’s just fun and games, with the kids using their powers to play football in the clouds and impress cheerleaders with their beer-pong skills. Then the most Peter Parker–ish of the gang (Dane DeHaan) begins to flirt with his dark side. Relentless bullying and the pressures of a dysfunctional home life awaken the raging Vader inside this adolescent Anakin.

For once, the found-footage approach adds something, allowing us to experience the discovery-of-powers origin story through the eyes of the teen titans themselves. After one of the boys learns to operate the camera with his mind, director Josh Trank employs crane shots and other complicated setups without cheating on the faux-vérité premise. Chronicle could have used sharper characters, and its inevitable transformation into an anti-Spider-Man—clinched by DeHaan’s mental disassembly of a live daddy longlegs—is more predictable than one of Aunt May’s lectures about great responsibility. That said, the film’s climax, which suggests Superman 2 by way of Cloverfield, delivers a lot of bang for its minimal production buck. Trank could have a real future in low-budget thrill rides—provided he isn’t auditioning for The Avengers 2.