With the mainstreaming of the multiverse within visual media in recent years, good old-fashioned time travel almost seems a little dated in 2023. The concept of parallel universes has gained popularity through shows like Rick and Morty and Stranger Things, boomed at the box office by infiltrating the Marvel Cinematic Universe and even essentially swept prestige awards season with Everything Everywhere All at Once. Meanwhile, when it does come to time travel, Groundhog Day-style time loops, such as those as in Palm Springs, Happy Death Day and Russian Doll, are more in vogue than films about outwitting past selves and wrestling with predestination versus free will. So, the time is ripe to revisit the 2007 film Timecrimes, in which traveling back just one hour requires one man to take extreme measures to avoid personal catastrophe.
The Spanish sci-fi thriller opens with middle-aged Héctor (Karra Elejalde) puttering around the house, which is in the middle of renovations, with his wife, Clara (Candela Fernández). He receives a strange phone call with nothing but breathing on the other end of the line and, later, leers through binoculars at a young woman disrobing in the nearby forest. When his wife runs an errand, his act of voyeurism escalates to him approaching the woman in the woods, whom he now finds naked and unconscious. Before he can do anything other than cautiously toss a few stones near her to see if she’ll rouse, he is promptly stabbed in the arm with a pair of scissors wielded by a mysterious figure whose head is wrapped, mummy-like, in a pink bandage.
Héctor flees, and as it grows dark, he seeks refuge in a nearby laboratory at the top of a hill. There, a researcher (Nacho Vigalondo, who also wrote and directed the film) coaxes him into hiding from his masked pursuer inside a large metal contraption full of a milky solution. Next thing he knows, Héctor is stepping out of the tank one hour in the past, twilight having resumed and the young researcher amazed by Héctor’s presence, as though the two have never met before. The scientist explains that the metal contraption is an experimental time machine, and that the man Héctor sees walking around his home through binoculars is his past self, essentially a Héctor 1. Despite the scientist’s admonitions to simply lay low and wait all this out, until Héctor 1 can make his way into the same tank an hour later and close the causal loop, Héctor 2 takes off in the man’s car. Doing so sets him onto a violent collision course with his past self, his wife and the woman in the woods.
Much of the fun in Timecrimes hinges on the pretzel-like loops of events folded back onto themselves. Héctor 2 finds himself seeing the same events from a different perspective as he sets about trying to set conditions just right to ensure he protects his own existence, which means guiding Héctor 1 into the time machine so that this past self essentially ceases to exist. As the scientist tells him, failure to do so would mean Héctor 1 is the man who gets to live in his house with his wife, dooming Héctor 2 to some kind of doppelganger status that would irreparably alter his life as he knows it. This film doesn’t contain Doc Brown-style warnings about ripping the fabric of reality apart; instead, the stakes are purely personal to Héctor, prompting him to do bad things because he is compelled to by a predestined fate.
Typical sci-fi concerns simply don’t factor much into Timecrimes. There’s no explanation of how the machine succeeds in allowing time travel or even much dwelling on the philosophical implications of Héctor’s predicament. Whether viewed as an allegory on adultery and its corresponding frantic efforts to conceal infidelity, as argued by film critic A.A. Dowd, or simply a tense, mind-bending thriller that serves as a madcap romp through impossible circumstances, Vigalondo’s film offers a satisfying third act that pulls everything together for a compelling climax. Héctor does some despicable things out of self-preservation, and the film nimbly creates a protagonist who is essentially forced to act antagonistically out of self-preservation. Though it doesn’t dwell on themes of morality, it does prompt the viewer to consider how vulnerable people are routinely exploited by those who are dead-set on achieving their desired ends, even if Héctor’s plight isn’t something he could have foreseen. Héctor is put through the wringer, enduring multiple car crashes and left bloodied and swollen, but he’s only a victim of himself.
Over the next few years following the release of this film, Vigalondo would break into Hollywood with shorts about the apocalypse and parallel worlds, respectively, in The ABCs of Death and V/H/S horror anthologies. And in 2016, he would notably write and direct Colossal, which involves Anne Hathaway manifesting and remotely controlling a hulking kaiju half a world away. But the otherworldly subject matter he’s thrived on is most effectively captured in Timecrimes, a film that doesn’t hinge on its sci-fi elements so much as it sets a flawed man loose in an intensely challenging situation and leaves us captivated in the time we spend watching him find his way out of it.
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