Movie Recommendation: Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes)

Dir. Nacho Vigalondo, 2007

I don't watch movies with the mindset of providing a critical review or seeking movies to write about. Rather these recommendation posts reflect moments I finished watching a movie and felt driven to tell the world about it!

I only recommend movies I'm excited about and eager for you to see.

---

A single-image justification that you’ll want to see this movie.

I’m a helpless sucker for time travel movies. I even recently enjoyed Timeline by Richard Donner (2003), which should indicate my passion extends even to the silly and historically questionable time travel flicks.

But when the mechanics of the time travel really hit, the loops work out as the timeline unfolds, each element given its reveal — whoo, that gives me a buzz. And Timecrimes cleanly unwinds, mostly by shirking the heady cognitive time traveller wrestling with his own invention and just focusing the story on a frumpy middle-aged man who cares nothing about the mechanics, he’s just trying to get his life back on track.

Cinema loves a Peeping Tom

Story follows a man named Hector, wheezy, a little pudgy, and suffering from insomnia, who thinks he sees something in the woods outside the (retirement?) home he and his wife Clara are building. He grabs some binoculars to see what’s going on in the trees, and finds a mysterious woman undressing.

This sparks his somewhat pervy curiosity and, once Clara has driven off on some errands, he goes to the woods to check what’s happening. There he finds the same woman, now naked and knocked out, and as he goes to check to make sure she’s okay, he gets stabbed by a freaky stranger whose face is hidden in pink gauze.

This sets off a cat-and-mouse chase that leads Hector to a nearby facility where a strange man urges him into a weird machine — and then the time travel nuttery begins!

Pictured: the NOT pervy elements of the time travel nuttery.

I’m not gonna claim the loops and reveals are profound or surprising, but they are deeply satisfying, as well as watching how the movie keeps all its little details and elements together. It’s no Primer-level cognition maze, it's an emotional labyrinth¹.

---

Cinema is the most robust time-travel machine we have. It not only has the record-of-the-past elements of recordable media but also a built-in language of non-linear storytelling and flash-forwards and -backs and slow- and fast-motion that gives humanity the ability to sculpt time in ways they only wish they could do with realtime physics.

Timecrimes acknowledges the time travel inherent even in the reaction shot, someone looking, seeing a thing, and coming back to the person looking, as an instigator of time travel. And the Peeping Tom² elements acknowledges one of the biggest draws people’ve really had to cinema in the first place, or as I very recently read in Midnight’s Children, “cinema is an extension of the brothel.”

There’s also something to be said about a time-travel movie that can keep its runtime to just over 90 minutes. Vigalondo keeps the world to a few locations and only four characters and just focuses on keeping the story moving forward. It’s literally enjoyable every single minute.

1. The difference between a maze and a labyrinth is that though both have winding paths, a maze presents a puzzle to be solved whereas a labyrinth leads you to its own conclusion.

2. Worth just throwing out here that Peeping Tom (1970) by Michael Powell is essential cinema as well, and for the same sick reasons Timecrimes is.