A grotesquely cos­tumed, knife-wielding creep on the Time­crimes (Los Cronocrímenes) the­atri­cal poster promises an exploita­tive slasher pic along the lines of Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre. To some degree, con­sid­er­ing the degra­da­tions made upon a breath­tak­ingly beau­ti­ful girl alone in the woods, it is. But Nacho Vigalondo’s Span­ish sci­ence fic­tion puz­zler is a friend­lier sib­ling to Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), a much more brain-spraining chrono­log­i­cal conun­drum. Both are rare sci­ence fic­tions that rely on a com­plex­ity of ideas rather than spe­cial effect eye candy. Vigalondo’s dif­fer­ent take on the sci-fi tropes of time travel (more on that later) makes Time­crimes a lit­tle eas­ier to follow.

The film opens with Héc­tor (Karra Ele­jalde) dri­ving home from gro­cery shop­ping with the hatch­back of his car ajar, leav­ing a string of gro­ceries behind him (yes, it’s a metaphor). He and his wife Clara (Can­dela Fer­nán­dez) are out­fit­ting a coun­try home as a retreat for the stressed-out insom­niac. We never learn what exactly ails him, or what kind of job affords them such a lifestyle. Lit­tle do we real­ize that vio­lence and chaos is already roil­ing in the bucolic woods around them. Their neigh­bor turns out to be a research insti­tute devel­op­ing a rudi­men­tary time machine. The device is not due to be tested for weeks, but unnamed staffer El Joven (Viga­londo him­self), is hang­ing around the facil­ity to tin­ker with it with­out permission.

Time­crimes’ pink boogieman

Héc­tor encoun­ters an uncon­scious nude woman (Bár­bara Goe­naga) in the woods, and finds him­self pur­sued by what he assumes to be her assailant. Tak­ing refuge at the insti­tute, El Joven vol­un­teers to hide him in an appa­ra­tus that resem­bles a hot tub pre­pared for a milk bath. From Hector’s point of view, the doors open mere moments later, but he finds him­self sev­eral hours in the past. Even though Héc­tor is the first per­son to ever travel through time, El Joven seems pretty una­mazed that the machine works. He’s also assured of the rules: Héc­tor must be sure to stay out of the way as his future self comes to the time machine, after which there will once again only be one Hec­tor in the world. Meet­ing him­self and/or alter­ing events (say, pre­vent­ing his future self from ever pass­ing back to the past), would cause a cat­a­clysmic paradox.

El Joven never spec­i­fies what exactly the results would be, but any­one famil­iar with Doc­tor Who, Star Trek, and the afore­men­tioned Primer would know that a tem­po­ral para­dox could rup­ture the space time con­tin­uüm, reverse the polar­ity of the neu­tron flow, be really socially awk­ward, or… what­ever. More illus­tra­tive is the para­dox at the heart of the Ter­mi­na­tor films: the evil arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence SkyNet sends a cyborg back in time to kill Sarah Con­nor, before she becomes the mother of SkyNet’s mor­tal enemy John Con­nor. Future-John also sends his best friend Kyle Reese back in time, osten­si­bly to pro­tect his mother. As David Fos­ter Wal­lace pointed out in his vicious cri­tique of Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judege­ment Day, the para­dox is that both time trav­el­ers cause the unwanted future to occur: Reese sleeps with Sarah and becomes John’s father, and the wreck­age of the cyborg becomes the tech­no­log­i­cal basis for build­ing SkyNet.

direc­tor Nacho Viga­londo appar­ently wrote his pitch meet­ing into his script

Héc­tor orig­i­nally acts impul­sively and attempts to con­tact his past self by phone, and then in per­son. He makes a series of calami­tous errors, and even­tu­ally comes to real­ize that he must shift his strat­egy to ensure he not dis­rupt what has already hap­pened to him, but will be every­body else’s future. El Joven only sticks Hec­tor into the time machine in the first place because a copy of him that already went through told El Joven he had to do it. Hec­tor kid­naps and abuses La Chica to recre­ate the per­verse sce­nario the past ver­sion of him­self encoun­tered. He com­mits a per­verse crime against her, but not for his plea­sure (to any­one not aware of his predica­ment, his behav­ior is psychotic).

But the increas­ingly crazed Héc­tor tries one last time to change events. He trav­els back in time again, cre­at­ing a sec­ond tem­po­ral loop-de-loop, a third dupli­cate of him­self, and more pro­lif­er­at­ing walkie-talkies than I was able to keep track of. Héc­tor only seems to real­ize near the end of his ordeal that every­thing is click­ing into a pre­de­ter­mined sequence of events, regard­less of his direct or indi­rect inter­fer­ence. Even­tu­ally, a calm­ness comes over him, and he sim­ply sits down and waits for events to fin­ish play­ing them­selves out, know­ing there is noth­ing he can do. So Time­crimes’ notion of time travel is not actu­ally like that in Star Trek or Ter­mi­na­tor, but more like the tele­vi­sion show Lost, whose rules stip­u­late that there is only one unal­ter­able time­line. There is no such thing as a paradox.

La Chica unknow­ingly helps Héc­tor out of two dif­fer­ent car crashes

Héctor’s time loops are straight­ened out by the end, with only one ver­sion of him­self left in the world. But his mis­ad­ven­tures in time have left a trail of destruc­tion behind him sim­i­lar to his spilled gro­ceries in the begin­ning of the film. La Chica lies dead in his gar­den, he’s crashed two cars, and the police are com­ing. La Chica’s neck­lace is in his pocket, and he’s sure to be found guilty for her death. Per­haps worse of all, a work­ing time machine site idle at the top of the hill, wait­ing for more mis­takes to be made.

The DVD also includes Vigalondo’s excel­lent short film 7:35 de la Mañana (7:35 AM), in which he exhibits his prowess with the slow reveal of nar­ra­tive information.

Offi­cial movie site: www.loscronocrimenes.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

•