TIMECRIMES (CRONOSCRIMINES)

(Spain, 2007, d. Nacho Vigalondo)

Time travel. What if there were the technology to go back in time only an hour or two? How would it affect the past? What if one encountered one's former self? Who would be the real person, the one from the future, the one in the present? And, what if the pattern were repeated?

Instead of Groundhog Day, over and over again, what if it were continued repetitions of the same person over and over again? Cronoscrimines does not exactly answer these questions but it exercises the minds and emotion as we look at a middle-aged man, Hector, who began a quiet Saturday afternoon at home and relived it over again (and over again) but decided to intervene to bring the process to a stop, only to so complicate matters that he was changing his history. There are also consequences for his wife and the girl he sees in the woods. There are more conscience questions and consequences for the young scientist who manages the time machine.

At only 90 minutes, this is quite an effective time travel thriller.

It begins tranquilly enough at the supermarket, then home with the wife working in the garden, the husband having a rest and then relaxing with his binoculars until he spies an unknown woman in the woods. Later, when we realise that he is seeing a situation set up by his second self, the film becomes very interesting as the writer-director cleverly shows us what the first Hector saw from the perspective of the second Hector. Plenty of deja vu all over again.

However, with the two Hectors, the one trying to destroy the other and then prevent him from entering the machine, the plot becomes more eerie with car crashes, stabbings in the woods, sieges of the home...

How can it all end? Can it all end?

This intriguing film not only asks, 'What the Hec?' but also, 'Which the Hec'!