Timecrimes 

Directed by Nacho Vigalando

Review by Roberto Azula

Films that feature time travel are at best a difficult task. Fortunately, Spanish director Nacho Vigalando does not waste any time in trying to unravel or solve the paradoxes of this genre. Rather, his clever, if not 100% plausible Timecrimes is a playful experiment in cinematic perspectives and time sequences, and all things considered, it holds up fairly well.

The film has a fairly simple, but hardly straightforward, plot. A married couple is relaxing in their front lawn of their new house. The husband Hector (played by slightly overweight, Fred Flinstonesqe Karra Elejalde) spies through his binoculars a very attractive young woman in the distant woods taking off her clothes. His wife is unaware of what he has seen, and she leaves to go shopping. Naturally his curiosity compels him to seek out the woman. After tramping through the woods, he finds the naked, but now dead, young woman. As he moves closer to investigate … well, I don’t want to give away too much, as Timecrimes is a bag of tricks and surprises. Suffice to say that Hector ends up in the laboratory of a young scientist (played by the director) who happens to be building a mysterious device.

Hector eventually finds himself transported into time, but soon he has to deal directly with time travel paradox: what will your interaction be like with your past or future selves? The film settles into a well-edited sequence illustrating the inevitability of fate, as Hector continually makes his situation worse in his bungled attempts to “correct” the past. Elejalde is superb as the time traveler who just gets fed up with the whole fiasco and forces the situation to a final resolution.