Year released: 2007
THE CHARGE: Rolling the clocks back instead of springing forward. I hate daylight savings time.
THE EVIDENCE: I've previously written about director Nacho Vigalondo's film Open Windows and found it to be a major disappointment. So I recently revisited his feature film debut Timecrimes, which really wowed me the first time I saw it years ago, to see if it was as good as I remembered. I'm happy to say that the film not only still holds up, but a second viewing made me appreciate it even more.
Hector and Clara are a middle-aged couple renovating their house when, while taking a break in their backyard, Hector catches glimpses of strange goings on in the woods bordering their land. While his wife runs out to bring home dinner, Hector heads to the woods to investigate. He stumbles across the nude body of a young woman and hesitantly approaches here, fearing that she's dead. But just when he notices that she's still breathing, a figure whose face is covered in bandages stabs him in the arm with a pair of scissors.
Hector runs until he finds what looks like an office complex nearby. He breaks in and after bandaging his wound, discovers a walkie talkie on the table in what seems to be a laboratory. Hector uses it to call for help, but a man on the other end tell him instead to head for a silo at the top of a hill. He tells Hector to be quick, because his video monitors show that the bandaged man is heading straight for the office.
"Behold, I have perfected the giant crock pot!"
To give away any more of the movie treads into the realm of spoilers, but I'll say this much: Hector ends up traveling back in time roughly an hour, watching himself run through the same set of actions that brought him to the silo. And the man in the silo ominously informs Hector that if he tries to change anything that happened in this timeline, there's a good chance he could cease to exist.
Watching the story repeat itself from different perspectives, I was impressed by Vigalondo's careful eye for detail. As both writer and director of the movie, he had full responsibility for the film's continuity and he delivered big time, even as the story revealed layers upon layers of new perspectives.
Importantly, that's what Timecrimes is ultimately about: perspective. Time travel is just a device for the film's lead character to see events unfold from different perspectives. Actions that appear to be evil and abhorrent on initial viewing suddenly become completely understandable when revealed from a new point of view. The fact that Vigalondo can keep the story coherent while juggling these different perspectives is a testament to his craft and determination as a filmmaker.
The invisible man was tired of kids trying to catch Pokemon in his woods.
As good as Vigalondo's script and direction were, the movie probably wouldn't have worked without the grounded performance offered by Karra Elejalde as Hector. He's not only the lead, he's the very center of the film. We see everything that occurs in the film from his perspective, which changes as he travels through time. By the movie's third act, Hector is a very different man than he was when the film began, and Elejalde's performance offers such a nuanced progression that we only fully realize it when the movie reaches a grisly conclusion.
Where Open Windows ultimately buckled under the weight of its novel approach to storytelling, Timecrimes shines by twisting conventional storytelling devices to tell a wildly original and inventive tale. Without even trying to go into the scientific mechanics behind time travel, Timecrimes remains one of the greatest time travel movies ever made.
THE VERDICT: Timecrimes is NOT GUILTY of warping the time-space continuum thingy, but instead warps viewers' minds with its serpentine yet expertly executed chain of events. Highly recommended!
