Chronicle: found footage, three teenagers, and no costumes at all

Three high-school students acquire telekinesis and film themselves doing it. That is the whole premise, and the film follows it with more discipline than almost anything else in the genre.

What it gets right

The first act is what would actually happen: they mess around. They move things, they prank people, they hurt someone by accident and are shaken by it. There is no call to adventure and no sense of obligation.

The powers develop like a skill — practice, plateaus, sudden jumps — rather than arriving complete. That alone puts it ahead of most origin stories.

Where it goes

One of the three is not okay. His home life is bad, he has no standing at school, and the power is the first thing he has ever had that other people cannot take. The film is a study of what happens when someone with nothing gets something enormous.

It does not end well, and the film does not pretend otherwise or find a redemptive turn. That is the reason it stayed with people.

The found-footage question

Mostly justified — the camera is a character’s habit, established early. It gets strained in the last twenty minutes, which the film solves with a device that is clever and slightly convenient. Minor.

Watch it if

You want the genre without the apparatus. Eighty-odd minutes, made on a small budget, and more genuinely unsettling than almost any blockbuster about the same idea.