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Curry Barker turned homemade YouTube comedy and horror into a Hollywood career with Obsession. Jack Auen and Kevin Walker, who direct under the name Cosmic Salon, bring a different proposition: What if the most engrossing thing you could put on a movie screen was a woman reading?

Their film, Chronovisor, follows a French academic whose investigation into a supposed machine capable of displaying images from the past becomes an increasingly consuming obsession. There are libraries, telephone calls, microfiche readers and long stretches in which the audience is invited to examine documents alongside her.

Shot on Super 16 for a budget the filmmakers confirm was in the ballpark of $55,000, it turns the apparently uncinematic business of archival research into a peculiar, absorbing thriller. It is the brainier corner of the new filmmaker boom, where a trip down a bibliographical rabbit hole can lead somewhere genuinely unnerving.

I stumbled into it almost as blindly as its protagonist stumbles into her mystery. An email caught my attention with its title, typeface and poster. Knowing little else, I drove to Glendale to see it on a big screen. What followed was the rare movie that made reading feel like action.

As a journalist who has spent plenty of time following old paper trails, I recognized the particular satisfaction of a clue falling into place, a call being answered, a dead end finally giving way to something. The film lets you experience the labor and the accumulating fixation. I don’t think I’ve ever read so much at the movies, or been happier to do it.

I also assumed the filmmakers had invented its elaborate mythology. They hadn’t. Walker discovered the Chronovisor story in Angels, Archons, and Aliens, a book by Ambrose Andreano, and sent it to Auen.

The film draws on an actual conspiracy theory involving a purported machine capable of viewing the ancient past, including the crucifixion. Cosmic Salon spent about six months gathering material, and say every text and photograph visible in the film is authentic except one item they created themselves.

They are keeping that exception a mystery.

In a world where an internet search or an AI summary promises an instant answer, there is something seductive about an investigation that requires touching the evidence. The film’s analog texture also grew out of necessity: the deeper they pursued the story, the more they found themselves hunting down old magazines and recordings. Their research became the model for their protagonist’s.

Anne-Laure Sellier, the professor who plays the lead, emerged from a search through academic contacts. Auen sent roughly 50 emails to potential candidates who might play Columbia professor Beatrice Courte, a memory specialist; only a handful received responses. (Sellier, who has never acted before, later told them she opened theirs because it came from an NYU address.)

Even the machine came with a bargain. Its components were borrowed from a Chinatown electronics shop for $2,000, with $1,000 refundable if they returned everything unbroken.

There is an industry story here, too. Asked whether agencies were pursuing them the way they have Barker, Walker offered a modest correction: “Not quite like that,” he said, before revealing that they are working with UTA.

With Grasshopper Film distributing Chronovisor in North America, the pair spoke to The Hollywood Reporter from Venice, where they were attending a workshop to develop another modestly budgeted project.

I went into Chronovisor knowing almost nothing. I only discovered afterward that the story wasn’t something you invented. Even the photographs of the monk are real?

KEVIN WALKER Very real. All too real.

JACK AUEN You’re not the only one to have thought that. I would’ve loved if we were clever enough writers to come up with this insane real-life story, but reality was better than anything we could come up with.

How did you meet and start making films together?

WALKER We met in sixth grade, or maybe the summer before. That was 2008, I think, and we started making movies together in Baltimore, where we lived, pretty much right away. We made hundreds of awful short films and YouTube videos throughout the years, hopefully honing our skills during that time.

You early on made the leap to New York City. What were you doing to support yourselves?

AUEN We went our separate ways for undergrad and then tried moving to the East Village together in 2020. COVID happened and we had a false start, moved back home to Baltimore for a little bit with our families. That’s when we made what we consider our first serious effort at a short film. At the time I was working in consulting, just basic strategy consulting in New York, which was not particularly creatively fulfilling.

WALKER I was wrapping up my master’s degree, and then I was writing book summaries for SparkNotes knockoffs for a little while. Eventually I became an usher at Lincoln Center for three and a half years.

AUEN We officially moved to New York in 2021 and lived in the East Village for a few years. I eventually started grad school in NYU’s dual-degree program, an MBA from the business school and an MFA from the film school, which I started in 2022.

WALKER I went to the University of North Carolina for undergrad and then Durham University, in the north of England, for my graduate degree.

Where did the idea for Chronovisor come from?

WALKER I stumbled across the real-life story in a book about aliens and religion. It’s an amazing book called Angels, Archons, and Aliens by Ambrose Andreano. Very worth reading if you ever have the time to read a thousand-page book about aliens.

It was this sort of mind-blowing interview with Pellegrino Ernetti about the Chronovisor, and it immediately felt cinematic. I sent it to Jack and we started cooking up plans with it right away. It took quite a while for us to realize that it was going to be a feature-length film, and for us to understand the exact formal methodology that was going to be employed to tell that story with the financial means that we had access to.

I’ve seen reports that the whole movie cost something like $55,000.

AUEN Certainly in that ballpark. Very little.

WALKER It was important to us that a microbudget was a fundamental feature of the idea itself. We didn’t want to take a really big movie and be like, “OK, can we do this on the cheap?” We were waiting for an idea to come along where there was an alignment of the formal and aesthetic interests of the film and modest means.

That’s when we put the pedal to the metal with Chronovisor, when we realized all of that was aligning: the modest means, the aesthetic vision, the thematic ambitions all tied in together to make it what we thought was a feasible microbudget project that could maybe entertain some people. Although I think it bores a lot of people to death.

Just the opposite for me. I assumed you’d recreated all these primary sources, but they were actual archival materials?

AUEN Every piece of text or image you see in the movie is 100 percent authentic, with the exception of one, which we created ourselves, which we’re leaving a mystery. Honestly, it would’ve been more expensive and time-consuming to create that entire menagerie of archives than it was to source them, which was also not easy. It was a different beast, doing the actual research. It took about six months.

At what point did you decide to leave the documents onscreen and have people read them? I don’t think I’ve ever read this much in a movie before.

WALKER When nobody knows your name and you’re just making a movie with friends at your house, you’re kind of like, “What’s the weirdest, dumbest thing we can do and see if it works?” We had this idea. There’s something really interesting about the Chronovisor story: It really only exists in these analog media.

We were like, “Why translate this story to some predictable international mystery or sci-fi film? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to use the material as it exists in reality to tell the story, to reflect our own research process in the film itself?” Because that research we found incredibly invigorating and exciting.

Is there a way on film to replicate that excitement? It sounded like a really bad idea and it wouldn’t work and it was a misuse of the medium, which was what sounded so cool to us.

AUEN It was an exciting challenge to see if we could pull it off. I don’t know if we did or not, but we were interested in making something interesting and hopefully good, in that order.

As a journalist, I recognized the satisfaction of following clues, including the dead ends. And in an age of internet searches and AI, I loved that she had to do this by hand, by phone, by book, by microfiche reader.

AUEN Both of those aspects, the dead ends and the analog nature of it, really fell out of the real research process of the conspiracy theory. We wanted to make an analog film. We shot on Super 16 for a reason. We also love all of those tactile archival media.

It made it all the easier that our actual research process required hunting down real old magazine articles and old recordings from news stations. We felt lucky that our aesthetic vision aligned with this analog story. There is stuff available about it online, but it really is pretty limited, pretty surface-level, and we did have to go deeper to find more.

Your lead, Anne-Laure Sellier, has to carry the film and speak multiple languages. How did you find her?

WALKER We are incredibly lucky to have found someone that could fulfill some of the demands we were making for this role. She basically carries the entire movie on her shoulders, needs to sound convincingly intelligent, needs to speak a bunch of languages, needs to have an incredibly watchable face considering it’s the only face onscreen. For a long time, we actually thought we might not be able to find someone.

AUEN Sending the classic “Do you want to be in a movie?” email to someone who isn’t an actor is already an uphill battle. Then you try describing this movie, what it’s about in subject matter, and you sound like a crackpot or spam.

We’ve talked to Anne-Laure since about this, and she basically says it’s because I had an nyu.edu email address that I was sending from. That is the only reason she even opened it. She teaches at HEC in Paris, but she’s a visiting NYU professor. She comes every June, so that’s how I found her name on the database and got her email.

She also happened to be visiting New York in June for work, which is when we wanted to shoot the film. She happened to be in Portugal with her family in August, which is when we wanted to shoot the Portugal section. It was true kismet, or a million little miracles that she fulfilled for us on the movie.

What made you think of her for the part in the first place?

AUEN We saw her headshot, so we knew she fit the demographic we wanted and had a really cool look that fit the character. Then we ended up finding a TED Talk she gave online, and another interview where she was talking about her work. I remember she was wearing this black turtleneck and talking in her French accent, and I was just like, she checked so many boxes right away for us.

It was initially quite a wide net, and then we got lucky that she was the only person for the job and, of the 50 emails I sent, maybe one of two or three that responded.

We never had her read for the part. We didn’t have her audition. We just met with her for coffee a couple times, and we were taking a huge, huge bet on her.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, or even know too much about it. But is there something definite we’re supposed to infer about her fate?

WALKER We have our ideas about it for sure. We had a very specific thought about her fate in mind, but we did want to leave room for some interpretive possibility, to not totally lock audiences into one particular perception of it. You’ll notice we get a little cagey talking about the ending, just because there’s a lot of secrets we like to keep about it.

AUEN We hope there’s enough to find interesting while remaining elusive in some way. I will just add that was the first scene we had in the whole film. Kevin cut a version of that as a standalone short film months before we finished the script for the feature. Once we had that, we knew that it was our ending. We see it as the inevitable North Star that the movie was always building to.

Did building the Chronovisor itself eat up a lot of the budget? It’s a beautiful machine.

WALKER It wasn’t too much, actually. It was an electronics store in Chinatown. We got some military and nautical equipment and some retro TV screens.

AUEN We struck a deal with him: We paid him 2,000 bucks and he would give us a thousand back if we returned it unbroken. Pretty much every step of the process was making deals like that.

So the Chronovisor is sitting in the back of a shop in Chinatown right now? How Gremlins.

AUEN It’s been disassembled, much like how the Vatican would like it to be.

What about the really heady dialogue? Even her opening monologue had me thinking, “Oh shit, am I up for this?” Are you guys that smart?

WALKER We like to be smart-sounding without actually being smart. We wrote some of it. If you really dig into details, it doesn’t make very much sense. We grabbed from some resources as well, some old public-domain books, to pretend that we were smarter than we are.

Anything coming out of Anne-Laure’s mouth sounds smart because she just has that innate quality. She helped form some of the dialogue, especially the dialogue in other languages, because we don’t speak them. She would tweak that herself to make it sound intelligent.

Who’s distributing the movie?

AUEN The film is distributed in North America by Grasshopper Film, who have been really amazing partners. They’ve done so much more for this movie than we ever thought, getting it in front of the right people and press and festivals and theaters. Cinetic Media has also been doing the publicity for the movie’s festival launch and theatrical launch, which has been a dream come true.

Have you been snapped up by one of the big agencies? Are they after you the way they’re after Curry Barker and the other hotshots?

WALKER Not quite like that, but we’ve been working with UTA.

AUEN I don’t know what they were getting themselves into, but we’re grateful.

You’re speaking to me from Venice. What are you working on there?

AUEN We’re working on our next movie. It’s a pitch workshop where you work with tutors, to try to apply for a grant for another micro-ish budget project. We’re here for 12 days trying to get our treatment together.