Timecrimes

I suppose you can settle the limitations of time travel as you go along, but whatever they are, they have to be irrevocable, and there have to be urgent repercussions when a common human splits the space-time continuum. The reason we don't get more distress signals of this scenario, of course, is something apparently called a "temporal paradox," when travelers into the past do things which irrevocably alter the future, so that their present no longer exists for them to go back to. In fact, any deviation from what has already happened can cause this to happen. So what if you find yourself compelled by seeing another man with your wife? Even if that man is you, what of your reaction to that sight? How can you be responsible for making your past self follow the same course of events if there is no way of making them understand why? How else will your own existence persist?
These quandaries are set to work in Timecrimes in a mind-blowing plot concerning a zig-zaggy drawing, the gesture of making circles around one's eyes with one's fingers, potential death by falling off of a roof after getting up there in an unconventional manner, and struggling to protect from danger a woman the protagonist loves. This is all done in an inventive and captivating thicket of suspenseful mechanics. The reason it is all so thrilling is because all of the suspense tools are makeshift from everyday things. For instance, it features violent attacks but it's not about a killer or an attacker. There is a crash, a chase and an abduction, none of which we are even close to expecting at any point before they occur. It begins with our main character, a normal guy named Hector, no TeenBeat cover boy, simply sitting on a lawn chair at his new country home enjoying the view he's paid for. The suspense tool at this point is a pair of binoculars. Then his wife leaves on a simple grocery trip. Then he catches a glimpse of a woman undressing in the woods. Once he hikes into those woods, he's in over his head.
The twists and revelations that make sense of as-of-yet unexplained details are the most electrifying elements of the plot's progression. That bandage, those scissors, that naked girl, the red truck. The inexorability of a mistake leaves only one inexorable solution, but if more than one of you are developing different desperate intentions for reliving the past, how will you return to being a single present-tense individual? Timecrimes is such an innately metaphysical device that such compulsive human dilemmas converge with scientific deduction beyond human control, making the plot as universal as any could ask for.
It is the undoable nature of any detail of writer-director Nacho Vigalondo's premise that causes it to be so seamless on a perfect logical level that there is literally no flaw. It is more imperative than ever that each and every set-up be paid off. It's not that he doesn't take any easy ways out; he can't! Just like his main character. As a result, Vigalondo's victory of creativity over budget epitomizes the favorite creative idea of unavoidable tragic fate. And that is by no means a spoiler, no matter how inevitable the conclusion is to the story's seemingly random parallel events. Timecrimes is too important for our time to be any less than careful in describing its content: A sci-fi movie with zero special effects, a cast of no more than four and a single natural location, it cites the brand of intelligent, imaginative film-making that upholds brains over spectacle.