Movie Review: Timecrimes

Directed by Nacho Vigalondo, 2007

IMDb listing

Pros: time travel done well

Cons: protagonist is stupid and sadistic, slow pacing

Hector, checking out something odd on a forested hill near his new house, is attacked and ends up hiding in what turns out to be a time machine.

Hector isn’t very smart.  After the time machine’s inventor explains what happened, he starts doing really stupid, and then sadistic, things.  Even though he knows the ‘him’ that’s at his house is him in the past, he decides to do some horrible things to himself.

I liked that there was one timeline and that Hector couldn’t change what had happened, could only enact different parts of his own past - no matter how sadistic those things looked from an outsider’s perspective.

I felt very sorry for the girl in the forest who’s terrorized throughout this film.  

The pacing is fairly slow considering how quickly you figure out what’s happening with Hector.

Ultimately, I'm glad I saw it, but I wouldn’t watch it again.