Timecrimes (2007)

Timecrimes, or Los cronocrímenes if we are being precise about it, is a 2007 Spanish thriller in which a man named Héctor stumbles into a time machine and spends the remainder of the running time chasing himself through a forest with mounting desperation. Nacho Vigalondo wrote, directed, and cast himself as the scientist, a decision that suggests either admirable thrift or a mild disregard for his own screen presence. The plot is a closed loop of scissors, binoculars, bandages, and a naked woman lying unconscious on the ground, and it holds together with the grim precision of a Swiss watch assembled by someone who has read too much Alan Moore.

What the film does not contain is any of the social furniture we have come to expect from contemporary cinema. There is no casting designed to signal virtue, no sermon on the environment, no economic lecture about the wickedness of the scientist's machine. The nudity is exploitative and serves the voyeurism of the plot, which is to say it functions as a mechanic, not a statement. Race, sexuality, and class go unmentioned across the entire causal loop. The woman in the forest is stripped, knocked out, and used as a prop for a man's escalating self-deception, and the film has no interest in commenting on this. It simply happens, again and again, because the loop demands it.

Here is a film with nothing on its mind except the machinery of its own paradoxes, and it is better for it. No message, no moral, no closing plea for us to be kinder to one another. Just a man, his doubles, and a pair of binoculars. We are left to admire the craft and to note, with some fatigue, that a thriller can still be built from nothing but cause, effect, and poor decisions. A modest vintage. Dry, astringent, no lingering aftertaste of sermon.