On an ordinary
Saturday, ordinary Spanish schlub Karra Elejalde drives out to his country
villa, where a mysterious phone call interrupts his siesta. Elejalde ventures
into his backyard, where through his binoculars he sees a woman stripping in
the woods. He walks down the hill to find out what's going on, and within
minutes, a masked maniac is chasing him. Elejalde seeks refuge at a nearby
scientific institute, and ducks into their time machine, which then—whoops!—activates,
sending Elejalde 90 minutes into the past.
Of all the
paradoxes time-travel stories offer, the most vexing may be that they're
awfully predictable in their unpredictability. As soon as the audience figures
out that Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes is
going to be about a man revisiting moments we've just witnessed, the natural
response is to start scanning the frame, trying to figure out which details are
significant. And in a movie as tautly constructed as this one, the answer is
clear: Everything is significant. Which makes the ways in which everything
connects all too easy to figure out.
Yet while it
isn't that hard to stay a step or two ahead of Timecrimes, the movie is still a nifty little genre piece, an
old-fashioned science-fiction mind-game with a healthy dollop of "Oh, the
irony." Vigalondo throws in a few good twists, some of which are genuinely
unpredictable, and though the film as a whole could be funnier and scarier, it
couldn't be much zippier. Because Vigalondo holds tight on Elejalde as he makes
one bad decision after another, Timecrimes isn't just fun to puzzle through, it also asks the audience to
consider whether we really want
to look closely at the person we used to be, even just earlier in the day.
Vigalondo builds carefully—maybe too carefully—to a socko ending, and a final line that suggests the
crushing weight of foreknowledge.