Timecrimes (2007, Spain)

I’ve been looking forward to Timecrimes for at least a year, maybe longer, because I kept missing it in theaters and I love time-travel fiction. Perhaps I anticipated it for too long, because I found it slight, less creative than I was hoping. It fits together rather well, but some things certainly feel contrived – why does Hector pause on the path the first time he heads up to the silo? Why does he go back home at the most inopportune moment? Some of these things are certainly attributable to the difficulties inherent in time-travel fiction (just look at last week’s Lost (“Whatever Happened, Happened”) as a good example), and some is probably due to writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s inexperience – he was only thirty when he made this, after all. It’s rather impressive for a debut feature, with generally strong camerawork and a plot with fewer holes than many time-travel narratives, so if the whole thing feels a bit light, it doesn’t diminish much in the way of entertainment.