Hector (Karra Elejalde) learns why it is not a good idea to poke through the woods around one's home. He finds a quite dead looking naked woman and is chased by a guy with a bandaged head who's brandishing a pair of scissors.
As it is customary in cases like this, Hector's flight from the faceless killer leads him into a nearby research facility and into a time machine. Did I mention Hector is not the luckiest of men?
Of course, if you step into a time machine once, you're bound to fuck some part of the past up badly, which just leads to the next badly planned attempt at putting the plot threads together again, and so on, and so on. If you now add to this Hector's impressive talent for bad luck and his equally impressive stupidity, you'll know where this film is bound to go.
Don't make the mistake and think Timecrimes is as intelligent as some of its reviews will let you think. It is not necessarily a dumb film, but far away from a film like Primer's interest in the philosophical dimensions of its concept.
On a technical level, the movie is flawless, if lacking a little in character and/or a style of its own. Everything is streamlined, designed to be as clear as possible and to keep the film moving, which is perfectly fine, yet a little disappointing if you like your time travel films to use their basic concept for something a little more ambitious than mere excitement. Of course, one should take what one can get, and I'll be damned if I continue criticizing a film for trying to entertain me. It's not the film's fault when it has other ambitions than I wish it would have.
Be that as it may, as a thriller with some nice moments of black comedy, Timecrimes is very effective, thanks to an unrelenting (but not too fast) pace and real fine acting all around. Karra Elejalde's Hector is a convincing Everyman and his transformation into someone who will do whatever it takes to achieve his goals would be a lot less believable in the hands of another actor.
I have some minor quibbles with the script - Hector starts out so clueless as too be annoying and not every of the characters' actions make as much sense as I would like them to do - but Nacho Vigalondo's direction is assured enough to help one ignore these flaws.
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