Timecrimes (2007) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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There are very strict rules in time travel about interacting with yourself. Some of them are criminal.

Timecrimes is a mashup of the best elements of the science-fiction time travel genre and a slasher horror film. It creates a complex and detailed timeline that seems clear-cut until the filmmakers reveal just a bit more to the story, which throws everything into disarray. You will not see this conclusion coming–or going.

First Impressions

A man who lives in the countryside spies something weird with his binoculars. Investigating, he finds a mysterious shack with all manner of scientific equipment inside. He falls into the device and is replicated twice through some sort of time travel. Now he must fight his doppelgangers in order to save his wife. Science-fiction and horror fuse in this week’s Timecrimes.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

A man named Héctor (Karra Elejalde) returns from the store with a car full of items that spill out in his driveway leaving a trail behind him. He takes a build-it-yourself side table into the backyard for his wife, Clara (Candela Fernández), who is gardening. Héctor then goes to take a nap, walking through some construction within the upstairs of his house. He awakens to a strange phone call with no one on the other end. Using a pair of binoculars he looks into the woods in the back of his property and sees a pretty girl (Bárbara Goenaga) take off her top. He also sees something else that he can’t determine. Clara says she’s going to the store for some things and will return later.

Héctor goes for a walk, passing an overturned trash dumpster and bicycle lying in the road. He finds the girl, now completely naked and apparently dead, just before he is stabbed by a man with a pair of scissors. Héctor runs further into the woods and sees that a mysterious man in a black trench coat and pink bandages around his face is following him. Finding an empty house with loud music playing, he breaks a window to get inside and uses a first aid kit in a back room laboratory to take care of the wound on his arm. Discovering a walkie-talkie, Héctor speaks to a young man (Nacho Vigalondo) who urges him to come up to the Silo at the top of the hill quickly. The man with the bandages is following him.

Now nighttime, Héctor arrives at the Silo where the young man tells him to hurriedly get into a circular chamber filled with white fluid in the middle of the room. Urged by the man’s insistence that the bandaged man is coming, Héctor complies. There is a flash of light and Héctor emerges from the chamber–it is now daylight outside. Disoriented, Héctor uses his binoculars to look back at his house and sees himself coming home from the store earlier in the day. The young man takes Héctor back to the house at the bottom of the hill and explains he has time traveled back in time by hours. He is now Héctor 2, while Héctor 1 is still going about his day.

Héctor 2 calls his house but doesn’t say anything, as he begins to realize what is going on. He steals a white car from the facility, uses a remote to open the gate, and drives back down the hill. He passes the pretty girl on a bicycle and pulls over to watch her pass. Another vehicle strikes him and his car crashes into a tree. He cuts his forehead, blood getting everywhere. He pulls off the bandage on his arm and wraps his face, slowly realizing he now looks like the man who chased him previously. The girl had heard the accident and comes to help him. He steals a pair of scissors she has and leads her into the woods, forcing her to take off her top just as he had seen her do earlier.

She tries to run but when he grabs her they fall down a small hill and she appears to die. He leaves her and makes his way through the woods, stabbing Héctor 1, just as he was stabbed. Héctor 2 hears the girl scream and finds her body missing. Returning to his house he follows her upstairs where he is hit with a small side table. Héctor 2 sees a foot on the roof and in pulling the girl back, makes her accidentally fall. Looking down at the body in the dark he realizes it is his wife Clara, her neck twisted and broken. Shocked, he heads back to the Silo just as Héctor 1 enters the chamber. Héctor 2 convinces the young man to send him back just before Héctor 1’s arrival. The young man refuses, having been told by Héctor 3 not to allow anyone else to use the device. Héctor 2 realizes that he is now fated to travel again, and helps the young man find a missing battery for the time machine.

Héctor 2, having removed his bandages, arrives in the past 30 seconds before Héctor 1, and becomes Héctor 3. He counsels the young man on what to do and what to say to get Héctor 1 (now Héctor 2) out of the property. From there Héctor 3 takes a red truck, runs Héctor 2 off the road, hits a dumpster, crashes, and passes out. Awakening Héctor 3 finds the young girl on the run after her scary encounter with Héctor 2. They find his house. Realizing what is happening, Héctor 3 tells the girl to hide upstairs, places his wife’s coat on her, and cuts her hair shorter. The girl heads upstairs to hide as Héctor 3 finds the real Clara and takes her with him to wait out the inevitable in their backyard. Héctor 3 tosses the scissors away as Héctor 2 drives away thinking his wife has died. Police sirens echo in the background.

“You need to be examined. You’re the first vertebrate to ever travel in time.” – The Scientist

History in the Making

Welcome to the second science-fiction/horror film for October’s 31 Days of Horror. It is also the 250th Sci-Fi Saturdays article on the channel, and I couldn’t be prouder that it’s Timecrimes, a 2007 Spanish film by director Nacho Vigalondo. It was his first full-length film and an amazingly complex time travel story for a low-budget film with only four cast members, two main locations, and zero special effects. I first discovered this film after seeing Vigalando’s 2016 sci-fi film Colossal, which is a quirky homage to kaiju films of the 60s and 70s. That inspired me to look for other films by the same director, which led to Timecrimes. Anyone that has read Sci-Fi Saturdays articles for a while realizes that I am a huge fan of the time travel genre in sci-fi, and when that can be coupled with the horror and thriller genres, great things happen.

Vigalando’s film style is very straightforward without any glitz or glamor. There are no fancy camera moves, except some dolly shots and long takes. He lets Elejalde do all the hard work creating a character that moves through three different states of being. There’s also a distinct lightness to the film at the start, that is gradually eroded away by the anxiety the audience feels knowing what’s coming and suspecting the worst. Héctor is introduced as a bit of a bumbler between spilling goods all over his driveway, and his comedic attempt to pick them up again. Elejalde starts the character in this way so that he can move Héctor into darker territory as the film moves on.

When Héctor is Héctor 1, he is curious and innocent. He has no reason to suspect the events unfolding around him as he ventures into the woods based on something he thinks he saw through his binoculars. After getting stabbed, he becomes more wary and frightened. When he becomes Héctor 2 disorientation is the immediate change for the character. As he then realizes what is happening to him, he chooses to follow the path set for him as he knows it, executing the things he saw him do while he was Héctor 1. Héctor 3 is a more determined individual set on saving his wife and ensuring that no further iterations of himself are created. He’s cool and calm, knowing exactly what is going to happen and when. Each version of the character feels like a unique entity even though it’s the same person during the same 6-8-hour timeframe.

Genre-fication

Timecrimes is not the first sci-fi/horror time travel film. That honor goes to The Terminator. But Timecrimes does invoke more of a horror-suspense vibe into the genre, which other films would attempt to copy in the future. From a science-fiction perspective, the film evokes comparisons to Back to the Future, Timeline, and The Philadelphia Experiment. Since 1985, all time travel films have had some relation to Back to the Future, which is unsurprising as it was the most popular time travel film of that decade. Timecrimes presents the young man drawing a model of Héctor’s path through time on the back of a calendar in order to create a diagram to help explain the process to the character and the audience. It evokes Doc Brown’s diagram of Mary’s trip back to the 1950s and into an alternate future as seen in Back to the Future Part II. Both Héctor and the audience are taken on a ride through time travel that may have seemed unexpected at the outset (ignoring that the word “time” is in the name of the film), which is similar to the characters of Timeline and The Philadelphia Experiment. They are made subjects of an experiment that they had no part in which utilizes time travel, causing confusion and disbelief as the initial side effects of the jump. The film also has a small element of Timecop in it as well, with Héctor needing to save his wife from the villain. Instead of being Jean-Claude Van Damme versus Ron Silver, it’s Héctor versus himself.

From a horror perspective, Timecrimes pulls from numerous “killer in the woods” films for its second act. Héctor’s bandaged appearance and psychopathic behavior evoke numerous film villains including Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part 2, the hooded killer in The Town That Dreaded Sundown, and Liam Neeson’s anti-hero Darkman (especially with the dark overcoat thrown in). But instead of a machete or an ax, this killer uses scissors. He stalks other characters in the woods, forces a young female to strip for him (well, a previous him), and then proceeds to kill her–accidentally as it was, and even then she was only unconscious. One of the most thrilling parts with the bandaged Héctor 2 is before the audience is aware of who this person is. Héctor 1 is contacted over the radio to come up to the Silo, but as he walks up the lit path the voice on the other end of the walkie-talkie encourages him to hurry because the bandaged man is coming for him. An extremely tense scene that has nothing more than a character reacting to a voice on a radio. Vigalondo also pulls in aspects of some famous suspense films to help set up the plot. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with Jimmy Stewart’s binocular-equipped voyeur, is a prime example. Those spy glasses really do invite trouble.

Societal Commentary

As often discussed in these articles, the best sci-fi films provide some look at humanity or society in a way that reflects back upon the audience. Time travel films offer the de facto ability to re-experience a portion of your life and do things differently the next time like Paycheck. Or to discover the missing element of a character’s happiness, like Somewhere in Time. Or maybe it’s used to save the life of someone close to the protagonist, as in Deja Vu. Timecrimes takes a different avenue as the timelines all intersect around the same day and character. At first, it’s a voyage of discovery about what is going on. Upon Héctor’s first loop in time, it’s about keeping the status quo and not “breaking the timeline.” No one knows what unintended consequences that would lead to–just ask Evan in The Butterfly Effect. But that leads to the discovery that his wife has apparently been killed by his actions. When he travels the second time, making his third incarnation, the worry from the audience is that Héctor is actually going to kill his wife.

Based on what has been explored in the film, audiences assume that Clara is dead from falling off the roof. The first thing that Héctor 3 does when he realizes that the girl has brought him to his house is to seek out his wife. He takes her by the shed, and pulls out a ladder–and at this point, it seems certain that he is going to take her to the roof. Instead, he tells her to stay in the shed regardless of what she hears and then proceeds to disguise the girl from the woods as his wife in order to confuse Héctor 2 and make sure things play out as they had originally. Was it really Clara who died on Héctor 2’s trip, or was it the girl disguised as Clara? Vigalondo is not clear with the lighting or the framing. It could be either. So it’s possible that Clara was killed in the 2nd timeline, and only by returning a third time does Héctor fix things so she lives. Regardless of that, the police are on their way at the end of the film and the couple still has a dead body lying by their house. What sort of consequences does this leave for them? Hopefully, it’s something that they can work out amongst themselves.

Timecrimes also has some things to say about voyeurism. Horror and suspense films are heavy on the subject. I mentioned Rear Window above, but there’s also Disturbia, a youth-oriented version of the same film, but most slasher films would also qualify. The quintessential slasher film from the 70s and the 80s often put the audience into the point-of-view of the killer. These POV shots create a heightened voyeuristic perspective of the hunt for subjects, and sometimes their killing as well. It takes a potentially voyeuristic form of entertainment and can move it to the realm of uncomfortability. Why does Héctor use these binoculars? They’re something he pulls out to scan the woods with. Maybe he’s noticed things happening back there before. At this time he sees a woman disrobing which piques his interest enough to go and investigate after his wife leaves. It’s very much like he’s having an affair; sneaking off to see a woman in the woods. The more he continues moving forward with his curiosity, the more he must continue moving forward to clean up the clues and ensure that nothing will be discovered about his involvement with the woman. Isn’t that what Héctor 3 does? He cleans up the mess left by Héctor 2, which was started by Héctor 1. Whatever consequences arise, it is still his problem.

The Science in The Fiction

The key to a good time travel film is internal consistency. That is, the rules must be set up and followed in the film regardless of how other stories handle time travel. Timecrimes doesn’t necessarily create any rules about time travel, but it does pay attention to the causality of the time travelers’ actions. The idea of causality in time travel films is making sure that effect follows cause. Oftentimes the causality is circular, such as Kyle Reese being sent into the past by John Connor in order to sleep with John’s mother Sarah–thus becoming John’s father. This is causality, and also paradoxical. Vigalondo takes great care to set up everything that has happened and would happen, in all versions of the scenes so that when audiences rewatch the film all aspects of Héctor’s trip are consistent.

The first example, chronologically, is the appearance of Héctor 3’s arm on the computer console when Héctor 2 emerges from the chamber. It’s not something that viewers will notice on the first viewing. Hector 2 comes out of the chamber vomiting fluid. And if you pay attention to the background, there is an arm sticking out from behind the machinery. This is shown in detail at the end of Héctor 2’s timeline when he’s helping the young man search for the battery in the weeds. Vigalondo shows flashbacks of the event, from the man’s perspective, and freeze-frames on the extra hand–indicating Héctor 3 was there all the time. Sometimes directors won’t go to this level of detail, but here it’s appreciated.

Vigalondo also sets up a number of other clues for audiences to pay attention to, some that distract from the actual events. These include the strange phone call to the house, Hector 1 seeing the timeline drawing on the back of the calendar before anyone knows what it is, the trashed dumpster, the discarded bicycle, and other small touches left by the character in his later/early trips through the film. The clues and the attention to detail by the director and the rest of the crew are what make the film so interesting. That also includes the shirt worn by the girl in the woods. It has an image of an upside down blue cat and a rightside up red cat–presumably representing the famous Schrödinger’s Cat paradox. That is a thought problem by physicist Erwin Schrödinger which postulates that a cat placed into a box with a poison can be considered to be alive and dead at the same time. Only when the box is opened does the probability resolve, revealing either one state or the other. This is of course a reference to the dead woman being either Clara or the girl, and why it may appear to be both at different times. At no time does there seem to be any inconsistencies in the timeline by the characters, which are often those small elements that make audiences question the believability of the film–also known as continuity errors. Timecrimes is meticulous in its setup and execution.

The Final Frontier

Timecrimes is a film that seems to get darker with each viewing. On its initial viewing audiences are busy trying to piece together the timeline of the film. Who is the mysterious bandaged figure in the woods? How will Héctor survive? And after that, how is Héctor going to fix this mess that he’s created? Subsequent viewings develop a darker picture of the damage that Héctor is taking–both physically and psychologically. His time travel is injuring himself. He is injuring himself, by stabbing his arm, running his car off the road, or smashing himself with a table. But how is time travel affecting his brain? The young man wants to check him out at one point since he’s the first vertebrate to travel through time. Not a ringing endorsement of the technology. In fact, a computer screen indicates that the software running the teleportation device might be a trial version, as the warning to “pay for your software” can be seen briefly.

Hybrid films often work better for one of their genres than another, see last week’s C.H.U.D. as an example of a sci-fi/horror mashup that is a better horror film. Timecrimes works equally well on both fronts. It satisfies the science-fiction fan with its engrossing and complex timeline. But it also satisfies fans of the slasher horror genre as it teases darker psychological perspectives from the characters. It gets a ringing endorsement from Sci-Fi Saturdays and 31 Days of Horror this season! Stay tuned this week for another theme week featuring collegiate slasher films, and then come back next Saturday for another freaky crossbreeding of sci-fi and horror.

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