Timecrimes (2007) Movie Review

“Timecrimes” (original title: “Los cronocrímenes”) is a small, low budget sci-fi film from Spain about a crazy hour in the life of an accidental time traveler. The movie doesn’t break any new ground when it comes to the subject of time travel, but there’s just enough humor and complexity to make it an engaging puzzle of a movie.

Karra Elejalde is Héctor, your average, workaday, middle-aged married man. At the start of the film, he and his wife have just moved into a new house. One evening, just as the sun is setting, Héctor finds himself with time on his hands, so he grabs a pair of binoculars to scope out his new neighborhood.

He sees an eerie yet titillating sight in the woods behind his house: a young woman stands there, and slowly begins taking off her clothes. Being your average male, Héctor immediately goes to investigate. There, he finds the nude woman lying unconscious in a clearing. Suddenly, he’s assaulted by an apparent psychopath, whose head is completely covered in bloody bandages.

In his frantic escape from the madman, Héctor stumbles into a strange facility where a scientist (played by writer-director Nacho Vigalondo) tells him to climb inside a machine to hide. When he climbs out a few moments later, it’s daylight again. The machine is actually a time machine, and Héctor has just become the first person to travel into the past. He now gets to live the last hour of his life all over again, and he becomes an active participant in events witnessed by his past self.

If you’ve ever seen a time travel movie in your life, it won’t take you long to figure out that Héctor is connected to the nude woman in the woods, and he’s connected with the crazy guy in bandages. This is not a film with big, surprising twists; it’s all about going along for the ride as an ordinary man is forced to do all sorts of absurd, insane, and violent things to keep the timeline intact.

Like a lot of stories in this vein, events don’t really come about in a natural or organic way. Characters do things simply because they know that they will do these things in the future. So in a way, the story is more about the psyche of the screenwriter than anything else. We’re really only seeing a naked woman in the woods because the writer wanted to see a naked woman in the woods. It’s hard to complain too much, because the naked woman in question (Bárbara Goenaga) is gorgeous, but others may find the sexual aspect of this story a bit unnecessary and off-putting.

Still, the movie brings a lot of humor and gives us lots to think about. How many of us would be willing to commit the same “time crimes” as Héctor to avoid causing a paradox, and possibly erasing ourselves from existence? And if Héctor is only obeying the forces of nature, and the rules of the big causality loop he’s trapped inside, can he really be held responsible for his actions? Can you blame him for the awful things he does if he’s simply repeating to the letter what he saw his future self do?

Also, I have no idea how director Vigalondo settled upon the Blondie song “Picture This”, which is used repeatedly in the movie as a frame of reference to let us know exactly where we are in the timeline. It’s a strange choice, but it works beautifully.

Unlike other cult films that delight in making time travel as dense and incomprehensible as possible (e.g. “Primer”, “Donnie Darko”), this is an easily digestible tale of paradox and predestination. “Timecrimes” is the perfect example of how a movie can tackle a weighty, complex, and mind-bending subject, and still have fun doing it.

Nacho Vigalondo (director) / Nacho Vigalondo (screenplay)
CAST: Karra Elejalde … Héctor
Candela Fernández … Clara
Bárbara Goenaga … La Chica en el Bosque
Nacho Vigalondo … El Joven
Juan Inciarte … Héctor Ocasional
Miguel Ángel Poo … Locución Radiofónica (voice)