Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes)
Nacho Vigalondo | Spain | 2008
88 min

The dangers, paradoxes and complication of time travel are deftly explored in this numbing, engaging, thrilling and occasionally creepy low-budget film from Spain. Timecrimes is an elaboration of the themes first made apparent in the independent film Primer, but both films have different aims. Primer was generally and genuinely confounding, telling a more intimate story blending the thrill of a discovery with the confusion of the effects of that discovery. Timecrimes has a more conventional purpose — to provide heart-pounding suspense and entertainment, and it does both with great aplomb.

The film understands the few basic things about the generally known and accepted conventions of time travel films, that going back in time is dangerous, that it can cause a rift in continuity, that it can result in a change for which we act as catalyst but have no way of controlling. The film has all of these moments, but it also encapsulates the time-loop syndrome, where an important scene occurs again and again with different outcomes, and in this it becomes an amalgam of both the sensation of anxiety felt while watching Memento and the humour of Groundhog Day. The story is very simple – a man moves into a new house and while setting things up with his wife, spots a woman on his binoculars in the nearby forest. His curiosity drives him to explore the shenanigans taking place and he bumps into a bloodied stranger who starts to stalk him until he loses his way and ends up at a peculiar house. The rest of the film cannot be explained because not only would that take away the joy of discovering it, but also because this is not an easy film to explain and harder still to write about, though in all honesty, if watched intently, it is never difficult to understand.

Many may point to the movies inconsistency of character action, what some of the people do and why — these are treated as plot devices (just like the time travel theme) to advance the story and this works admirably well in the service of the film. As serious and mind numbing as all of it is, there are also moments of frightening dark comedy and one character who appears bandaged and bloody may be setting his sights on dethroning Jason from the Friday the 13^thseries as a masked killer. In truth, the film is such a mixture of many familiar devices, ultimately including the notion of crime and trying to prevent it, and while these ideas may not be new to films in isolation, this movies collective execution of those themes certainly is. The use of an economical budget is built into the script – there are only a handful of characters, one location and recurring scenes. This is yet another low-budget film that does with its ingenious script what many films cannot do with expensive special effects; cause wonder and amazement.