The idea of constructing a movie out of what purports to be — but isn’t — found footage is not necessarily a bad one. The “found footage” conceit lends a level of hyper-naturalism, a kind of camera phone-captured really really real life, in theory. That it’s been used so often for horror and SF movies recently makes a degree of sense as well, as suspension of disbelief is a concern in both genres. Inevitably, there’s a point at which it becomes almost impossible to sustain the conceit — usually toward the end of the second act and in the third — but with Chronicle, writer Max (son of John) Landis and director Josh Trank have made a good enough movie that, when the found footage conceit occasionally falls apart, in the end it doesn’t really matter.
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