Three high-school friends make a shocking discovery at a party one night and suddenly find themselves charged with super-human abilities.

Chronicle

Cert. 12A

3/5 stars

AS they test and refine their skills, they discover their deadly potential and vow to curb their irresponsible behaviour, but they can’t agree on the deeper reasoning behind what happened to them and begin to drift apart, with fatal consequences.

Filmed entirely on hand-held camera, Chronicle associates strongly with the horror genre, adding a natural sense of foreboding to the lives of the dangerously powerful trio.

You get the feeling writer/director team, Josh Trank and Mark Landis, came up with the premise of the film as teenagers, which obviously has its pitfalls, but does mean the young characters’ reactions to their new-found powers are more authentic than in bigger-budget, cash-cow superhero films.

There’s none of the ‘Must save and/or take over the earth’ that we’ve come to expect from characters bestowed with super-powers, instead the three use their abilities to do exactly what real-life teenage boys would probably do, namely, freak-out unsuspecting strangers and play football at 30,000 feet.

Chronicle really tries to do something different and succeeds in moving the superhero genre in an interesting, de-slicked direction, but it still feels a little amateur and the characters are verging on stereotypical, which stop it from being a stand-alone hit.