Timecrimes (2007) Review

Official trailer

Timecrimes is one of the cleanest small-budget time travel films ever made.

Seen once. The 7 rating is what it earns. Nacho Vigalondo writing, directing, and appearing in his own film. Karra Elejalde as Hector. Candela Fernández as his wife. Bárbara Goenaga as the woman in the woods. Spanish production. Original title Los Cronocrímenes. A man becomes his own pursuer through three iterations of the same afternoon. The film fits its premise into 92 minutes without padding.

What a nasty, clever little machine this is, and I had a great time with it. Vigalondo takes a cheap premise, a pod in a lab and a man with binoculars, and builds a trap that snaps shut on its own hero. My reservation is that the budget shows in places and the film walks away from its ending a little too fast. As a puzzle box, though, it’s airtight, and I respect a time travel movie that refuses to cheat.

The Setup

Hector (Karra Elejalde) is a middle-aged man moving into a new house in the Spanish countryside with his wife Clara (Candela Fernández). He sits on his back patio with binoculars and notices a young woman undressing in the woods nearby. He walks into the woods to investigate. The woman is naked and unconscious on the forest floor. A man with a face wrapped in pink bandages attacks Hector with scissors.

Hector runs. He stumbles onto a research facility. The facility contains a single scientist (Nacho Vigalondo himself, playing El Joven). The scientist hides Hector in a large white pod to protect him from the pursuer. The pod is a time machine.

When Hector exits, he discovers he’s now one hour in the past. He watches his earlier self through binoculars sitting on his own back patio.

The film documents what Hector does with his foreknowledge across three iterations. The first iteration is what we’ve already seen. The second iteration is Hector trying to manage the consequences of having been in the past. The third iteration is Hector trying to fix the problems the second iteration created. Each iteration requires him to be in a different place at the same moment. He becomes his own pursuer through choices made in each iteration.

The Closed-Loop Premise

Most time travel films use the technology to change the past.

Timecrimes uses it to confirm the past. Every event Hector tries to alter is the event he was always going to cause. He becomes the pink-bandaged pursuer because the time machine sent him back to the moment when the pursuer needed to exist. He attacks the naked woman in the woods because the woman in the woods needed to be attacked for the events of the first iteration to happen.

The closed-loop structure is the film’s central craft achievement. The audience doesn’t learn the structure is closed until well into the runtime.

The first iteration plays as a conventional mystery. The second iteration introduces the time travel. The third iteration reveals that Hector has been creating the events he’s been trying to escape. The structure folds in on itself with no loose ends and no paradoxes that the film doesn’t address.

Vigalondo wrote the script to be airtight. Every event in the first iteration has a cause in a later iteration. Every choice Hector makes in a later iteration produces an event in an earlier iteration. The audience can map the entire structure on paper and verify it works. Few time travel films manage this kind of structural rigor. Timecrimes justifies its small-film status by being mechanically perfect within the resources it had.

The Three-Iteration Structure

The first iteration runs approximately thirty minutes. Hector explores the woman in the woods, encounters the pursuer, and reaches the research facility. The pacing is patient. The audience doesn’t yet know the film is about time travel. The atmosphere is closer to suspense thriller than to science fiction.

The second iteration runs approximately thirty minutes. Hector exits the time machine and discovers he’s one hour in the past. The scientist instructs him to avoid contact with his earlier self at all costs. Hector ignores the instruction. He attempts to manage the situation by becoming the pursuer who chased his earlier self into the woods. The scenes where Hector wraps his own face in pink bandages and stalks his earlier self through the woods are the film’s clearest demonstration of the closed-loop premise.

The bandage-wrapping scene is the moment the film convinced me. Watching Hector build the monster that chased him, out of pink gauze and bad judgment, is funnier and more horrible than any diagram of the loop could be.

The third iteration runs approximately twenty minutes. Hector has caused additional problems through his second-iteration choices. His wife is now in the woods because of what he’s done. The pursuer in this iteration is yet another version of him. He has to deal with the consequences of his own previous time-travel choices while preventing his wife from dying. The third iteration’s resolution requires accepting that some events can’t be prevented because they’ve already happened.

The Karra Elejalde Performance

Karra Elejalde plays Hector across all three iterations. The performance is the film’s anchor. Hector is a middle-aged man who reacts to extraordinary circumstances by making the worst possible choices and then trying to fix the consequences. Elejalde plays the increasing desperation across the iterations without losing the character’s basic recognizability.

The performance has to work at different tones in each iteration. First-iteration Hector is curious, then panicked. Second-iteration Hector is calculating, then desperate.

Third-iteration Hector is exhausted and morally compromised. Elejalde handles all three without overplaying any of them. The character ages visibly across the runtime even though only a few hours pass within the film’s chronology.

Elejalde was 47 during filming. The middle-aged-everyman quality matters for the film. A younger actor would have produced a different film. Elejalde brings the lived-in weariness of someone who has already accepted certain things about his life. The time travel doesn’t turn him into an action hero. It turns him into a worse version of the man he already was.

I think Elejalde is the reason the film works at all. A more charming leading man would have tempted us to forgive Hector, and Elejalde never asks for forgiveness. His Hector is sulky, stubborn and a little pathetic, and I believed every rotten decision he made.

The Nacho Vigalondo Direction

Nacho Vigalondo wrote, directed, and acted in his own debut feature.

The film cost approximately €2.6 million. That was real for Spanish independent production but tiny by international standards. Vigalondo shot in a single Spanish forest location with one house, one research facility set, and the surrounding woods. The production discipline is part of why the film works. Limited locations forced the script to be airtight.

Vigalondo plays El Joven, the young scientist running the research facility.

The casting choice is also a structural choice. The film’s writer-director is on screen explaining the time travel rules. The choice reads as authorial intervention. Vigalondo is telling the audience he wrote the rules and he’s enforcing them. The role is small but specific.

His later career has been varied. Extraterrestrial (2011) was a smaller-scale alien invasion comedy. Open Windows (2014) was a webcam-perspective thriller. Colossal (2016) was a Hollywood production with Anne Hathaway about a woman who controls a kaiju attacking Seoul. Vigalondo hasn’t returned to the structural rigor of Timecrimes, but he’s continued working in high-concept material. Timecrimes remains his cleanest single film.

The Pink-Bandaged Pursuer

The visual choice to wrap the pursuer’s face in pink bandages is the film’s most distinctive image. The bandages obscure the pursuer’s identity while leaving the face partially visible.

The audience knows the pursuer is hiding something, but not yet what. The image becomes uncanny on second viewing because the audience knows the pursuer is Hector himself.

The bandage choice also produces practical advantages. Karra Elejalde could play the pursuer without prosthetic makeup. The bandages provided the visual disguise. Vigalondo could shoot multiple actors as the same character across the iterations without expensive doubling work. The low budget required creative solutions. The bandages are the solution that became the film’s signature image.

The visual choice has influenced later horror and thriller filmmaking. Various productions have used bandage-masking to suggest identity concealment with implied violence. Timecrimes is one of the earlier films to use the device for time-travel-related identity confusion. The contribution is small but real.

The Tonal Register

Timecrimes works closer to suspense thriller than to science fiction.

The time travel is present but isn’t the source of the film’s tension. The tension comes from Hector’s increasingly bad choices and from the audience’s gradual recognition that those choices are the cause of the events the film opened with. The horror element is real but is grounded in Hector’s responsibility for what he’s done.

The tonal choice is what distinguishes Timecrimes from most time travel films. Most time travel films use the premise for adventure, romance, or spectacle. Timecrimes uses the premise for moral horror. Hector becomes a worse person across the iterations because the time travel gives him the opportunity to be worse. The film argues that the technology doesn’t corrupt him. The technology reveals what he already was.

The moral horror is what lifts Timecrimes above the gadget movies for me. Most time travel films let you fantasize about fixing your mistakes. This one argues you’d make worse ones, and I find that far more believable.

The ending completes the argument. Hector sits on the lawn beside his wife. She’s fine. The events of the day have produced a survivable outcome through Hector’s accumulated choices, including the killing of an innocent woman whose death was required for the loop to close. The film doesn’t punish him for this. It just shows the two of them on the lawn and lets the audience absorb what Hector has done. The quiet ending is the film’s clearest moral statement.

The Ending

The third iteration concludes with the woman from the woods falling to her death from the roof while an earlier Hector chases her. The woman was a victim of one of his earlier-iteration choices. The pink-bandaged pursuer, who’s also Hector, has wounded her. To close the loop, Hector has to kill her so that her body will be in position for the events of the first iteration to occur correctly. Her death is the one he arranged. He sits on the lawn with Clara, alive.

The ending is morally exact. Hector has murdered an innocent woman to save his wife. The plot required it.

The closed loop demanded it. The film doesn’t pretend the choice is acceptable, and it doesn’t punish Hector either. It simply ends. Clara is on the lawn. Hector is home. Everything has resolved. A woman is dead in the woods because Hector chose to put her there.

The audience is left to do the moral accounting. Vigalondo refuses to do it for them. The film treats the ending as a question instead of as a resolution. The question is whether the survival of Hector’s wife is worth the death of the woman in the woods. The film has no opinion. It just shows what happened.

I think the final shot on the lawn is a great last image and a slightly evasive one. I respect Vigalondo’s nerve in refusing to do the accounting, but a woman is dead in those woods, and the film’s silence about her felt a little too comfortable to me.

Craft: A Cleanly Constructed Achievement

Is Timecrimes worth watching?

A 7. Timecrimes is one of the cleanest small-budget time travel films ever made. Nacho Vigalondo writing, directing, and appearing. Karra Elejalde anchoring the three iterations. A closed-loop structure that holds together under scrutiny. The film belongs in any time travel cinema conversation.

I’m giving it a 7 because I enjoyed every turn of the puzzle and wanted more from the aftermath. The money shows in a few sequences, and the ending goes quiet where I wanted it to hurt. The loop itself is flawless, and I’d put this in front of anybody who thinks time travel movies have to be sloppy.

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