LOS CRONOCRIMINES/ TIME CRIMES

Spain, 2007, 90 minutes, Colour.

Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernandez, Barbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo.

Directed by Nacho Vigalondo.

A film about crime but not in the way expected.

The film focuses on a middle-aged man, Hector, coming home from shopping and goods falling out of the bag, going for arrest, his wife busy doing woodwork. While he drowses in the chair in the grounds, his attention is taken by a young woman, and her seemingly being attacked. He ventures out, discovers the woman, perceives her pursuer,  his head bandaged, pink. He flees, sees a building and makes contact with the scientist working there, hurrying and escaping into the building to elude the murderous pursuer.

To protect him, the young scientist, played by the film’s director, gets him into a vat – but, the young man has been experimenting on time travel via the vat and its contents and elaborate equipment.

The result is that the man goes back almost 24 hours, the scientist not knowing the subsequent story and his own involvement. The man is urged to stay in the laboratory but he goes out, encounters the young woman, she helping him, he trying to save her.

Which leads then to the fact that in his interventions, he is responsible for the young woman’s death, he is wounded, his face bandaged and pink with the blood, and then confronting his other self who is investigating what he saw, leading to emotional complications, his wife, the two Hectors and the creation of the third – and, the elimination of the subsequent Hectors and trying to get back to the right time.

Interesting in its playing with experiments in time.