Falling down a rabbit hole used to take some effort. One of the pleasures of Kevin Walker and Jack Auen's 2026 film Chronovisor, an "armchair mystery" following an academic's investigation into the rumored existence of a device that can play audiovisual recordings of any moment in history, is in its depiction of the page-flipping, archive-raiding, cold-calling work that an intellectual obsession once demanded.
We don't learn much about the actual day job of Beatrice Court, a multilingual professor at Columbia University who first stumbles across references to the film's titular machine in some text or other in one of New York City's more beautifully appointed libraries. Something to do with neuroscience and memory. Her dinner companions, in an early scene that buries her table conversation under restaurant clamor, aren't all that interested. Neither is Beatrice, it seems.
What really gets her fired up is the chronovisor, which an Italian Catholic priest named Pellegrino Ernetti claimed (in the film, and in reality) to have invented in the 1970s in collaboration with scientists including Wehrner von Braun, the German engineer who built rockets for the Nazis before he helped architect the American space program. Ernetti, a scholar of Gregorian chant and ancient music, said the device picked up on lingering sound waves (or something like that) to show him the crucifixion of Christ, among other visions of the past.
The Catholic Church, Nazi scientists, time travel — these are rich ingredients for a quality conspiracy theory, and the highly educated Beatrice is just as susceptible to their lure as the rest of us. And yet she is a scholar, a professional. Instead of scrolling through her feed or turning on the Joe Rogan podcast, she burrows deeper into those beautiful old libraries, which we see through her eyes. As she pores over musty hardbacks and journal articles for any scrap of information about the chronovisor, the film pulls us close to the text and highlights lines. We watch together as staticky videos, clipped from newscasts and more mysterious sources, play out on unspooled VHS tapes. When she does use her smartphone, it's to call far-flung attorneys and academics and publishers, telling lies in an effort to draw closer to the vanished priest and his fantastical device.
At this point, her gig at Columbia may as well be forgotten. Later in the film, as Beatrice delivers a lecture at the university, you can tell her heart's not in it. Glimpses of her tasteful, lonely apartment, soundtracked by a booming orchestral score, hint at an appreciation of the finer things, but don't give much indication of a rich home life. Her real work is in the text. Her real life is in whatever is flashing behind her eyes as she turns page after page.
Chronovisor is the best short story that Borges or Eco never wrote, and it's an apt parable in the age of doing your own research, when every mystery has been flattened into content. These days we don't have to work so hard to fall down the rabbit hole. We don't have to work at all. How can our jobs provide our lives with meaning while there are thousands of secret histories staring at us right here on our phones? How can anything?
By the time (spoilers ahead) Beatrice leaves the haunted libraries of New York for an isolated village in Portugal, where the chronovisor was reportedly stashed away by a man who could no longer separate its visions from his own memories, we have a sense of what's coming: a screen, of course. Even the industrious scholar can't resist it forever. It can show you anything, everything, but in the end, it presents only a distorted reflection of yourself. There's no looking away.