THE FUSE

For anyone whose happy place is an old-school library reading room, all aged dark wood and green-and-gold reading lamps casting warm islands of light in the velvety murk, “Chronovisor” will be a near-fetishistic delight — even as it makes quite unhappy places of such hallowed havens of learning. The first feature by U.S. writer-directors Jack Auen and Kevin Walker builds on the studied lo-fi style of their well-regarded 2021 short “Marblehead,” doing an awful lot with very little as they fashion an ornate, occult-inflected sci-fi film from the pages of various yellowed academic volumes: not adapting them, let it be said, but reading them, and making us do the same, in ways that prove eerily atmospheric and surprisingly riveting.