Timecrimes is your standard, run-of-the-mill suspense thriller, but with fantastical time travel where sensible twists used to be. Far too simplistic for something that masquerades as a puzzle, Timecrimes, a Sundance Film Festival selection from Spain, effectively holds your attention right up to the point where you figure the whole thing out. Which, unfortunately for the film, is about half way through.
Hector (Karra Elejalde), slovenly and lazy, sits on a lawn chair in the backyard of his brand-new country home, tranquilly surveying the nearby countryside through a pair of binoculars. Suddenly he sees something: a woman undressing among the trees. Deciding to investigate — does he sense something is wrong or does he want a closer look? — he hikes up the hill to get a better look. But upon discovering the woman unconscious on the ground, he is attacked and stabbed by a sinister figure clad in bandages like some sort of grotesque mummy.
Fleeing for his life, Hector stumbles upon an empty complex in the middle of the woods and takes refuge in a scientific laboratory full of ultramodern-looking equipment. Hiding himself inside a peculiar machine, Hector emerges moments later to discover that it is several hours earlier. A stunned technician (writer/director Nacho Vigalondo) tells Hector that he has gone back in time. While Hector is naturally incredulous at first, he can’t argue with his own eyes. Looking down on the valley from his lofty, wooded perch, he can see his house, his lawn chair and himself sitting in it.
The only way to set things right is to do nothing at all. Any interference, he is told, will upset the timeline and make things worse. The slightest variation could cause ever expanding ripples in time. And most important of all, he must avoid coming in contact with his reflected self at all costs. To do so would irrevocably change the future. If only Hector had listened…
Timecrimes sounds creative, but is actually unremarkably conventional. The film’s plot appears as a tangled web but is actually very linear if you follow each strand individually. It only pretends to get confusing where the strands overlap.
We have a hard time relating to Hector because we are all so much smarter than he is, so far ahead of him, anticipating the cause and effect of his actions before he’s even dreamed them up. Timecrimes only works if you accept that there are people out there — Hector among them — who have never watched an episode of science fiction and don’t have even an elementary understanding of basic time travel paradoxes.
How bizarre is it when time travel is more plausible than a film’s situational narrative? Clumsy and implausible, Timecrimes’ script calls for Hector to undertake and his audience to be complicit in an ever-growing series of far-fetched events. We buy that a man could travel through time but we cannot accept the series of events that get him there. The filmmakers wish us to believe that Hector gets himself so embroiled in correcting his mistakes and rewriting the timeline that just about any action or decision he makes is plausible. But that’s not remotely the case.
I was reminded of several films while watching Timecrimes. One was Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, another film that attempted slight of hand but failed because it insisted its audience connect the dots before the big reveal, thus deflating the very twist that was supposed to be so shocking. Primer, a simple American independent film, covered some of the same ground and did it far better.
Timecrimes’ plot can simply not sustain its brief 88-minute running time. The film runs out of gas as soon as you decipher the plot, though that doesn’t stop director Vigalondo from pretending we are none the wiser. His “ah-ha!” moments are little more than “ho-hum.” The more Vigalondo tries to throw us off the scent, the more repetitive and laborious the film feels.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
