Time, time, time, see what's become of me

Time travel stories come in three varieties: in perhaps the most common kind, someone travels forward well into the future and sees wonders or horrors (H.G. Wells' The Time Machine). In the second kind, someone travels backward through time to some historical era and often tries to alter some event (stop Lincoln from being killed, for example), and inevitably one of the paradoxes of time-travel is dealt with: could we change history, or would our efforts be in vain?—Ray Bradbury’s short story "A Sound of Thunder" is an excellent example of this. The third kind involves travel that's not so far-flung, just a few years or months or even days into the past or future; this highlights another brain-numbing paradox of time-travel: what would happen if we met ourselves? The first example of this kind of story I ran across was David Gerrold's novel The Man Who Folded Himself.

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes) is a low-budget Spanish film from 2007 which follows in the footsteps of the American indie film Primer (2004). Both are small scale sci-fi time travel movies which use virtually no special effects, but also need multiple viewings in order for the viewer to keep track of the various temporal comings and goings. However, having seen Primer, I was prepared to let go of the need to know exactly where, when, and why everyone is where they are, or why they should or shouldn’t be someplace.

Hector (Karra Elejalde) is relaxing in his backyard, scanning the woods with his binoculars, when he sees a nubile young woman taking her clothes off. With his wife off on an errand, he goes into the woods looking for the girl and finds instead a sinister figure with a bandaged head (above) wielding a pair of scissors and darting about in the trees. Hector takes refuge in a isolated research laboratory and runs into a handsome, bearded scientist (Nacho Vigalondo, at left) who tells Hector to hide inside a large pod-shaped device, which turns out to be a time machine which sends Hector an hour into the past, which means there are now two Hectors running around in the woods, and thus begins a frantic attempt on the part of Hector and the scientist to get Hector's life back into one timestream.

The rest of the movie doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, but if you go with the flow, it's interesting and sometimes tricky fun, though ultimately a shallow and somewhat depressing exercise in convoluted storytelling. If you've seen Primer, you'll figure out generally where this is heading. Vigalondo, who also wrote and directed, has a solid screen presence, but unfortunately Elejalde, his leading man, does not, and I found it difficult to care much what happened to him, or the two female characters who are basically just plot devices. Still, a diverting time travel fantasy which you should see before the big stupid inevitable Hollywood remake gets it totally wrong and turns it into a big-budget film with Bruce Willis and Christian Slater.