Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes) [2007] – Suspensefully Humorous
When his wife heads out for a grocery run, Hector (Karra Elejalde), a happily married, middle-aged man explores the woods surrounding his new abode, his curiosity peaked by the image of a young girl stripping behind the trees through his binoculars. Upon reaching the spot, he finds the girl lying against a rock, naked and breathing. As he attempts to wake her, he is attacked by man wielding a pair of scissors, with his face covered with a pink bandage. Chased into the fenced campus of a strange research facility, Hector meets a young man (director, Nacho Vigalondo himself) who coaxes him to hide in a large, liquid-filled vessel in his lab.
FLASH
The sun is back out, the vessel opens and Hector emerges. He walks outside to a point overlooking his own backyard. As he looks through the binoculars, he sees a man looking just like himself in the lawn with his wife. Events involving him that had taken place not more than a few hours ago replay themselves in front of his own eyes.
Timecrimes explores the idea of time-travel in a suspenseful, yet quirky scenario where an affable man is pitted against himself as he jumps between temporal settings to alter events for a favourable result. No matter what he does, fate will reinforce its control over his life. The film is thrilling, yet comic, chaotic, yet comprehensible, and most of all, sublimely tragic, yet endearing.
The director wisely chooses to ignore logic, avoiding having to explain his twists in detail. Vigalondo is happy to twist his plot meticulously, often leading his protagonist himself to question logic behind events. As a viewer questions pop up repeatedly as we ourselves attempt to explain what is going on, but so frantic is the pacing of the film that we often are left with little time to hold on to those thoughts. It’s a plot which unfolds several times, each time differently with exceptional directorial command.
Made on a shoestring budget of $2.6 million, this Spanish film overcomes its implausible concept due to superb performances that make the events so believable. Karra Elejalde leads the 4-character cast with enchanting determination. We sympathize with him, yet we laugh at him. We chide him for his stupidity, yet admire him for his resilience.
As the film ends, we wait for a definitive resolution. The writer-director has set his characters running loose in a vicious, endless cycle, the interest of which has just about run out of steam. Vigalondo leaves the audience with his own dilemma at this point: “Fuck! Now what?”
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
It was an interesting film . its nice to see someone writing about it here.
I don’t really agree with your take that Logic is left behind in this movie. For god’’s sake it’s not Love Story 2050.
I watched this flick a couple of months ago but haven’t been able to find anything that didn’t add up. I actually always felt that time travel movies take many liberties as they can’t pick whicher version of time they are going for.
I guess it all goes back to the what I call Timecop adage of ” Same matter can not exist in the same place”.
There are 2 options, you travel in time and inevtiably change the time creating a new paradox( back to the future 2), or nothing happens and you can’t make changes as your reality is already set. (even if you go back in time to kill your grandpa, you would still exist as you exist from YOUR timeline).
I think Time crimes is an excelletn example of how to play with those old conventions.
I know a lot of time travel geeks prefer Primer to Time Crimes, but time crimes makes my list of best ones.
Interesting writeup.
however if the movie was so impressive , why such a short writeup Vijay?
I think there are still terabytes of storage left and you probably have some hundreds of GBs left for you!!
VPJ – If I write anymore, I don’t think there will be much left for you to discover in the movie itself.
I wrote ‘Okay dokie’ and the comment engine said that the comment was too short. Looks like I have a problem with brevity and you with ‘elaboration’ :-)
The movie was mind-boggling alright….spent hours going through it consecutively to figure out what’s going on….
I guess Vigalondo stopped it where he did because the Hector we started with didn’t go into the machine again, so the cycle has been left behind.
Primer was fascinating but you really got to be a geek to fully appreciate it
This movie was a good watch mainly coz it shows us the dangers, paradoxes and problems with time travel. The movie is a darker than compared to say Groundhog Day, where the same scene is repeated over and over again with different consequences. But script is there to entertain you by using time travel as the medium. Primer was brilliant and more original but it was a tiring watch. You appreciate this movie more mainly because of the limited budget and the reuse of the same costumers and locations that they had, they did that very cleverly.
@ jibin
sometimes I just name drop some obscure movies to get more geek-cred eg Primer, Citizen Kane, battleship potemkin :-)
But secretly my favorite movie is The goonies