Movie review: 'Timecrimes'

Nacho Vigalondo (Credit: Magnet)

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3 stars (out of four)

The microbudget Spanish time-travel thriller “Timecrimes” doesn’t end as well as it begins. Then again, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo deliberately fudges the beginning and end points of his premise, which involves one of those nutty causal loops so dear to writers and consumers of science fiction.

 “Time flies here,” says Clara at the beginning of the movie. She doesn’t know the half of it. Simple set-up: Lounging on the lawn of his newly purchased summer home, playing around with a pair of binoculars, Clara’s husband Hector spies some articles of clothing hanging from branches in the nearby woods. Then he sees a woman slowly taking off her top. A few minutes later, with Clara gone to the store, he ventures into the woods and as he edges closer to the unconscious naked woman...an unseen assailant stabs Hector in the arm with a pair of scissors.

All that’s in the first 15 minutes. “Timecrimes” confines itself to four characters and a poker-faced approach to a ridiculous scenario. It’s enough to say that Hector, fleeing his assailant, hides in a nearby laboratory, where a worker encourages him to squirrel himself away inside a mysterious tank filled with milky liquid of uncertain origin. When he steps out of the tank a few seconds later, it’s 90 minutes ago. I like this idea—why should all time travel involve decades or centuries or epochs?

As Hector becomes observer and then meddler in his own ultra-recent past, the increasing narrative craziness isn’t fully embraced by the filmmaking. Still, Vigalondo has a sense of humor as well as a sense of when to cut and how to frame, and how to add a flourish or two. (At one point Karra Elejalde, who plays Hector, is throwing himself against a door, and the camera zooms in partway with each blow.).

Along with Elejalde’s Hector, Candela Fernandez’s Clara and Barbara Goenaga’s innocent and very quickly naked “Girl,” Vigalondo takes the role of a hapless employee of “the center.” Chucky Namanera’s musical score never takes the obvious bait, even when an apparent psycho-killer with a bandaged head pops into view. The film’s second half crumbles the second you begin assessing its logic. But the same holds true for J.B. Priestley’s play “Dangerous Corner,” or the films “Back to the Future” or “Memento” or the little-known indie “Primer.” The modest satisfactions of “Timecrimes” come down to a protagonist divided against himself. The question is simple: Who’s gonna win?

mjphillips@tribune.com

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