In the early evening, Hector figures he deserves a little break from moving into his new house and retires to his lawn chair in the backyard. He won't have traveled more than a mile from this spot before he falls into a spinning wheel of existentialist dread--a stunning nightmare that pushes RASHOMON-style multiple-perspective storytelling so far past its outer limits that it flips into its very inverse. Through his binoculars, Hector spies something in the nearby trees--it appears to be a woman undressing. Hector's inevitable investigation results in a bizarre but fleeting encounter with a terrifying figure wrapped in pink head bandages, followed by an intense escape that takes him to a strange silo which houses a mysterious machine. The events that "follow," to use a term loosely, make for what might be the most flawless time-travel story in the history of movies. Where BACK TO THE FUTURE, TERMINATOR, and most other beloved time-tampering films are accepted only because they fudge the implications of causality in an entertainingly forgivable way, the Spanish-language TIMECRIMES does no fudging; it simply hurtles its audience into an unnerving thought experiment and, from there, never submits to a significant break in logic.

Propelled by mesmerizing déjà vu, twisted yet camouflaged tragicomedy, and a low-key sense of queasy dread, this TWILIGHT ZONE-ready tale effortlessly transforms its rather mundane setting into a disturbingly surreal landscape. There is nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the grassy yards in which the movie takes place; it's just that they're lit by the kind of natural twilight of dusk--at once familiar and strange--that makes everything seem as if it's playing out in the mind's soundstage. Through its subtle, uncommon characterization, TIMECRIMES deftly reconciles its temporal-mind meditations with an eerie account of a loving man who acts in spite of himself.

DVD Features:

Region [unknown]
Keep Case
Audio:
Dolby Digital - Spanish
Dubbed, Subtitles - English
Subtitles - English, Spanish

Distributor Notes: A man being pursued by a murderer stumbles into a mysterious lab and accidentally travels back in time. A naked girl in the midst of the forest. A cloaked stranger with his face covered by in bandages. A disquieting mansion on the top of a hill. All of them pieces of an unpredictable jigsaw puzzle where terror, drama and suspense will lead to an unthinkable sort of crime. Who’s the murderer? Who’s the victim?

Karra Elejalde: Actor in THE NAMELESS
Nacho Vigalondo: Writer/director/actor
Candela Fernandez: Actress
Barbara Goenaga: Spanish Actor, SILVIA'S GIFT (2003)

Nacho Vigalondo: Writer/director/actor

Esteban Ibarretxe: Producer
Eduardo Carneros: Producer
Javier Ibarretxe: Producer

Nacho Vigalondo: Writer/director/actor

Chucky Namanera: Score composer

3 stars out of 5 -- "[T]here's a dash of FRANKENSTEIN and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, with a shaker of Frankenheimer's SECONDS, all simmered in a stew of Philip K. Dick."
"[S]panish writer and director Nacho Vigalondo has audacity to spare. Constructing a looping, economical plot and directing like a fire marshal in a flaming building, he conjures urgency and disorientation from the thinnest of air."
"TIMECRIMES presents an off-the-rails thrill-ride....A meticulously layered film....Just watch it -- more than once."
"[D]one in an ingenious and entertaining way..."