Timecrimes (Spanish: Los cronocrímenes) (2007) Directed by Nacho Vigalondo. Written by Nacho Vigalondo. Starring Karra Elejalde, Nacho Vigalondo, Candela Fernández, and Bárbara Goenaga.
A lot of time travel stories are about trying to make things better, or at least trying to maintain the status quo. Many are about changing the past or fixing a mistake, or fighting important battles, catching criminals, or finding love across time. And of course many are about changing circumstances through a repetitive loop, with the characters having a chance to improve things with each go-round.
But here’s a confession: I really like it when time travel makes everything worse.
I like the nasty, dark version of all those time travel tropes, where no matter what the characters are trying to do, no matter what they are trying to achieve or who they are trying to help, they completely fuck things up. My personal favorite is the Farscape third season episode “…Different Destinations,” in which the characters try to prevent altering the past but end up triggering an atrocity. Which is pretty on-brand for Farscape and its characters, but it’s an example that illustrates my point. It can make for some fun stories when trying to fix things via time travel causes more and more cascading problems.
Writers love time travel because it can be whatever we want it to be. Sure, there are people who will go on and on about rules and plausibility, but it’s all made up, so clever writers can do whatever the hell they want. And what a lot of writers do is use time travel as a way of exploring the complex intersections of choice and causality in a heightened setting and extreme situations, concocting painful scenarios that let characters see—and suffer!—the consequences of their actions. Add in the paradoxical, puzzle-box nature of a causal time loop, and you’ve got a big sandbox for stories in which characters can get stuck on a gruesome merry-go-round of Fuck Around and Find Out, all for our entertainment.
And, as a bonus, it be done on a budget. We may have started this month with the epitome of a big-budget, effects-heavy Hollywood movie from a major studio, but the rest of the movies we’re watching this month are the polar opposite in terms of production. I think Timecrimes is the most expensive of the three, with a reported budget of about $2.6 million. (That number is reported everywhere, but I’m not sure what the original source is.)
Even though the business of cinema is often the most boring part to talk about, it is an important factor in what movies get made and what movies get seen. I didn’t set out to highlight low-budget, indie sci fi this month. I just realized as I was putting a list together that a lot of time loop stories fit that description. Time travel stories, especially those about tricksy causal loops, lend themselves well to small indie films with limited settings, small casts, and minimal visual effects.
Director Nacho Vigalondo began his career making Spanish-language short films. His brilliantly oddball, absurdist film 7:35 in the Morning (2003) was nominated for an Academy Award; take eight minutes out of your day to watch it, because it’s great. Vigalondo credits the Oscars attention with making it possible for him to tackle his first feature-length film. He has said part of his inspiration for Timecrimes came from comics, particularly from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Dragnet parody “Chronocops,” which was published in 2000 AD #310 in 1983. I haven’t read the whole story (I’m sure some of you have!), but the first page gives a strong sense of the humor and tone. More recently, Vigalondo is known for writing and directing Colossal (2016), the off-the-wall kaiju film starring Anna Hathaway as an alcoholic who manifests a giant monster on the other side of the world.
Timecrimes was filmed in only three locations in northern Spain, with only five actors, which includes the director himself and a stand-in double for the main character. There are no science fictional visual effects to speak of; Vigalondo has said that he specifically wanted the time machine to look a little janky and old-fashioned. Even the scale of the time travel is small, as it’s only one hour that the main character lives a few times over. Just long enough to be a creep, go for a walk in the woods, meet a hapless scientist, and make everything worse.
When the film starts, we meet Héctor (Karra Elejalde) and his wife Clara (Candela Fernández), a mundane middle-aged couple fixing up a house in the Spanish countryside. They bicker, they tease, they kiss; they are ordinary in every way. At least until Héctor, relaxing in the backyard, starts looking around aimlessly with a pair of binoculars and spots a young women undressing in the woods. In the first of many bad decisions, Héctor waits for his wife to leave before heading into the woods to, uh, investigate. He finds the young woman (a nameless character played by Bárbara Goenaga), now fully naked and lying unconscious on the ground.
(Aside: A weirdly high percentage of professional reviews of this movie state that the young woman is dead when Héctor finds her. She is not dead. Firstly, she is breathing, as close-ups on her bosom show quite clearly. Secondly, the fact that she is not dead at this stage is actually a key element of the movie’s paradoxical plot and eventual conclusion. So many reviews say she is dead that I began to wonder if reviewers left halfway through the film, or didn’t pay much attention, or simply assume beautiful naked women in the woods have to be dead, or never watched the movie at all but only copied the plot details from other reviews.)
Before Héctor can decide what to do about the unconscious naked woman in the woods, he is stabbed in the arm with a pair of scissors wielded by a mysterious figure whose face is obscured by bloody bandages. Héctor flees into the woods and stumbles on the grounds of an undescribed “institute,” which honestly kind of looks like an ordinary community college. He breaks a window to get inside and goes looking for some bandages to wrap his wound.
Now, look. This movie is called Timecrimes. It’s right there in the title. We see a creepy figure in the woods wearing bloody bandages on his face, then we see the main character wrap a bloody wound in bandages. We can connect the dots! I would argue that we are in fact meant to connect the dots, and to do it long before Héctor figures anything out. Héctor is not the sharpest tool in the shed, so this is very much not a story in which the movie is trying to outsmart the audience via the point-of-view character. This is, instead, the kind of movie where the audience is watching with grim amusement as Héctor makes a serious of increasingly outrageous decisions.
This is especially apparent once Héctor starts chatting over walkie-talkie with an unseen scientist (played by Vigalondo). The scientist uses the threat of the bandage-wearing attacker to lure Héctor into a different building, where he suggests Héctor hide in a peculiar machine. The manipulation is so obvious that even the least attentive among us know by this stage where this is leading; it’s not a surprise when Héctor emerges from the machine to find that he has traveled an hour backward in time. The scientist wants him to spend the next hour hiding away so as not to disrupt the timeline, but Héctor is not interested in listening to what the scientist has to say.
In his defense—perhaps the only thing I will say in Héctor’s defense—the scientist really doesn’t give the impression of somebody who knows what he’s doing. Because, it turns out, he doesn’t. He’s not supposed to be there at all and certainly not supposed to be turning the time machine on; he’s only doing it because he’s annoyed that other scientists are waiting so long to run time travel experiments that he won’t be at the institute when they do. One gets the impression he might be a lab tech or intern. (A grad student wouldn’t worry about getting in trouble for working on the weekend.) He doesn’t know what will happen if Héctor does or does not disrupt things. He just doesn’t want to get in trouble for running the time machine he’s not allowed to use.
When Héctor makes a phone call to his home and realizes that it’s the same phone call he received earlier, he gets the idea that he has to be the one to make sure everything happens exactly as it already happened. What follows is both disturbing and funny, as Héctor constantly exacerbates a bad situation as he tries to match the previous time loop perfectly. Around about the time he meets the young woman on the road and lures her into the woods, the audience is wailing, “Oh my god what are you doing,” with a sense of horror not unlike watching a car wreck unfold in slow motion. Vigalondo’s absurdist style is well on display, such as in the scene where bandage-wrapped Héctor is attempting to frighten his other self but doesn’t know where to stare menacingly through the trees.
Naturally, everything has to go very wrong. That’s where it was always going to go, because Héctor is doing menacing and violent things to preserve an inexplicable causal loop. He ends up back in his house, where he thinks he’s pursuing the young woman. When she falls to her death he realizes he was terrorizing his wife, Clara. That’s when he decides to do it all over again—another time travel loop, another layer of manipulating the events of the last hour—in hopes of preventing Clara’s death.
Writing in the A.V. Club, critic A.A. Dowd described Timecrimes as an allegory for infidelity, likening Héctor’s increasingly desperate attempts to maintain the status quo to the absurd lengths a cheater will go to hide their secret. On the one hand, I can see where that interpretation comes from. The problems begin with Héctor creeping on a young woman and end with him sacrificing that woman to protect his marriage. And there is definitely an element of the movie that highlights the careless selfishness of Héctor’s choices—he’s really not much for thinking before he acts—that fits that theme pretty well.
On the other hand, I’m not sure this film needs to be an allegory for anything in particular. It feels to me more like a thought experiment, a vehicle for playing around with ideas of causality, paradox, and free will, with no high-minded message other than that the idea that we could use time loops to improve circumstances is a hell of an assumption.
Could Héctor have broken out of the loop at any other time? We don’t know. What would have happened if he’d listened to the scientist and stayed put? We don’t know. Any certainties we place upon the story come from our assumptions about time loops as a narrative device, and we never see what happens when the rules Héctor thinks he is following are strained. All the movie itself says is that all of Héctor’s attempts to get back to a time and place where he can pretend none of this had ever happened were doomed to fail.
Could he have kept trying? Another round to try to save the young woman, perhaps? We don’t know that either. The scientific parameters of time travel are one thing, but his choice to arrange things so that she dies is the culmination of all his other choices. It’s a grim ending, without any sense of relief that all of it has been worth it.
Timecrimes is not a perfect movie, and there are parts that don’t quite work for me. But that dark ending, with Héctor and Clara on the lawn and the police sirens approaching in the distance, ties it together in a way that I found ultimately satisfying.
What did you think of Timecrimes? If you knew there was a time machine sitting unused in a nearby laboratory, would you sneak in and turn it on? How do you feel about these sort of puzzle-box paradox time loop stories? I hope you feel at least somewhat curious, because we’ve got another one lined up…
Next week: Let’s go to an even smaller production with an even smaller budget with the time travel mindfuckery of sci fi indie darling Primer. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft.
