The idea of a time-travel movie might conjure up visions of sci-fi hardware and futuristic settings. But it needn’t be so.
As an ingenious new Spanish film proves, you can have a time-travel picture without ever departing from mundane everyday reality. “Timecrimes” jolts an ordinary man just a few hours out of his moment, but the consequences are huge.
The first section of the movie plays out as plain suspense. A man named Hector (Karra Elejalde) leaves the back yard of his isolated home when he spots something strange going on through his binoculars. Venturing into the woods, he encounters not only a naked woman but a violent attacker.
A chase leads to some sort of science facility, where a lone researcher (played by the film’s director, Nacho Vigalondo) is working on a secret project. And there things begin to loop around in ways that will force us to re-examine what we’ve just witnessed.
Examining what we’ve seen is key to a film that begins as an apparent parable about the dangers of voyeurism. At first, it seems Vigalondo is merely being clever in the way he goes back to stage events from a different perspective.
Still, clever is clever, and the movie’s twists are wonderfully inventive. Vigalondo has a deft way of combining humor with a real capacity for creepiness.
But in the final section of the film (it’s roughly divided into thirds), Vigalondo reveals something even more sinister at work in his design. At which point the title begins to make more sense.
If you saw and loved the 2004 low-budget time-bender “Primer,” you need to check out this movie — it’s less brainy than “Primer,” but more, shall we say, visceral.
Nacho Vigalondo is a young Spaniard whose 2003 short, “7:35 in the Morning,” was nominated for an Oscar. That film did something similar to “Timecrimes”: It offered an increasingly disturbing wind-up to something that initially appeared fun.
He’s good at that. The skin-crawlingest moment in “Timecrimes” comes when the object of Hector’s voyeurism suddenly turns around and looks straight at Hector — and at us. Vigalondo seems to be saying that “watching” can be a perilous activity. It certainly is in this case.
“Timecrimes” ½
Time-bending: This clever Spanish film offers an ingenious sci-fi premise, in which a voyeuristic man finds himself re-living a particularly disturbing experience and trying to set it right. Director Nacho Vigalondo works out all the time-bending possibilities in a wonderfully tantalizing way. (In Spanish, with English subtitles.)
Rated: R rating is for violence, nudity
Now showing: Varsity
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