Nacho Vigalondo’s low-budget Timecrimes (2007) is an old-fashioned tale of time travel without the usual flashy visual effects and ambitious production. There are no explanations given for the sudden appearance of a time machine, nor grandiose theories about its philosophical implications. It is just a story of an ordinary middle-aged man, whose wandering eye on a lazy afternoon leads to elaborate attempts of rectifying his mistakes by tinkering with time.
The stakes are personal, and the atrocities become more and more deliberate — with seemingly no way out of this causality conundrum. Unusually clever and occasionally thrilling, this Spanish thrilller manages to address the themes of existence and inevitability with a rather simple setting and execution.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
What Is Timecrimes About?
The seemingly mundane opening scene shows a few shopping bags falling out of the boot of a moving car. The driver, Héctor, parks outside his house and gets out to retrieve them. This sets the tone of the rest of the film, where he is seen constantly retracing his steps each time he leaves behind a trail of errors.
The actual story begins (before beginning yet again and again) with a girl. While his wife Clara goes off to run an errand, Héctor lounges in his garden with his binoculars. He spots a young woman undressing in the woods behind his property and, moments later, sees her lying still on the ground. He is instantly (and understandably) curious, and goes to investigate. When he steps closer, he is suddenly stabbed in the arm with a pair of scissors. He turns around to find himself face-to-face with a mysterious figure, whose head is wrapped in blood-soaked bandages.
Héctor runs to a nearby research facility, where he communicates his predicament to a scientist over a walkie-talkie. The scientist guides him to his location and persuades him to hide from the approaching killer in a large, fluid-filled contraption. When Héctor gets out, he discovers that he has been sent back one hour in the past. The scientist explains to Héctor 2 that he should stay low until Héctor 1 makes his way to the time machine, where he could end his existence and Héctor 2 can resume his life. Otherwise, the scientist warns, Héctor 2’s interference could disturb the space-time continuum and cause unforeseen consequences.
Héctor 2 takes off in the man’s car to go to his house instead, and gets hit by a truck on the way. As he is mopping up his bloodied face, he realizes that, in an unexpected plot twist, he himself is the bandaged assailant. The girl from the earlier scene, who witnesses the accident, comes to help him. Understanding that he needs to reproduce events exactly as they happened to lure Héctor 1 into the time machine, Héctor 2 forces the girl to undress in the woods. When she tries to escape, he inadvertently knocks her out and places her body in the view of Héctor 1.
The events unfold as before, with Héctor 2 attacking his former self with the girl’s scissors and Héctor 1 running to the laboratory. When he finds out that the girl has escaped, Héctor 2 follows her to his house. He grabs her on the roof, and she ends up falling to the ground and breaking her neck. When he sees the body, he believes he has accidentally killed Clara, his wife, instead.
Héctor 2 rushes to the lab and, after Héctor 1 gets into the tank, he asks the scientist to let him go in the time machine so he can prevent Clara’s death. The scientist reveals that he has already been contacted by Héctor 3, who told him to stop Héctor 2 from visiting the past again. Desperate, Héctor 2 says he wants to go back anyway.
How Does Timecrimes End?
When Héctor 3 gets out of the time machine, he makes sure that the sequence of events isn’t disrupted in any way. He drives the truck that hits Héctor 2’s car. He tells the scientist on the walkie-talkie not to let Héctor 2 go back in time, simply because he is told earlier (or later?) that is what happens. He comes across the girl when she is running away from Héctor 2, and tells her that he is also hiding from the same man. They go to his house where he separately encounters Clara, who tells him she has called the police because she saw a bandaged man and there is someone inside their home.
Héctor 3 locks Clara in a shed, and puts her coat on the girl. While cutting her hair so that she could resemble Clara, he tells her to go hide in a cellar upstairs — thus, allowing Héctor 2 to accidentally scare her so that she could fall to her death. The film ends with him and Clara sitting in the garden, moments before he knows he will be visited by the police.
One the surface, the film seems to illustrate the repercussions of adultery, reflecting the frantic efforts that are made to cover up an act of infidelity. As Héctor stares into the woods again at the climax, the audience is reminded of where even minor transgressions can lead. That theme is then projected onto the concept of time travel: one deviation in the timeline can lead to something much bigger.
Vigalondo also explained that the film’s theory is that “you only have free will within the limits of your perception.” This is demonstrated by a picture of Schrödinger’s cat on the murdered girl’s shirt. Depending on what Héctor sees, she is dead and alive at the same time. Believing that he has witnessed her murder, he ends up becoming the murderer himself. Stuck in a loop, he does not seem to have much of a free will to completely change the reality, and just seizes an opportunity to sacrifice an innocent girl so that he can save his wife.
Is There Going to Be a Timecrimes Remake?
United Artists reportedly picked up the remake rights to Timecrimes, and Tim Sexton is said to have written several early drafts. Later though, it was announced that the project has been shifted to Dreamworks, and the screenwriter Steven Zaillian, best known for Schindler’s List and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, will head the project. However, there has been no news on any development in recent years.