Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 23 April

Timecrimes (Vigalondo, 2007)

For ten years I was the Wellington Manager for the New Zealand 48 Hours Furious Filmmaking competition. (I should really post some of the very cool films here one day.)

Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes was incredibly influential on many of those 48 Hour films because it showed that a clever concept and great planning could trump any of your budget and time limitations.

Héctor (Karra Elejalde) and his wife Clara (Candela Fernández) are renovating their new house – at least Clara appears to be doing most of the work. Héctor is spending his time in the garden, watching the neighbourhood through binoculars.

He sees a pretty woman in the distance and then a suggestion of what looks like an assault. He goes to investigate and is stabbed in the arm with a pair of scissors by a mysterious figure wrapped in bandages. Trying to escape his assailant, he finds a mysterious laboratory where the bewildered scientist (played by director Vigalondo) suggests he hide in his vat full of bubbling liquid. When Héctor emerges, the scientist is nowhere to be seen but nothing around him is quite as he left it.

The more Héctor learns about his predicament, the more confident he gets at his own ability to solve it, but he doesn’t think anything through and the anomalies mount up until tragedy strikes. Unless he can get one more shot at fixing it.

Fiendishly clever, Timecrimes is one of those brilliant constructions where every revelation opens up possibility instead of closing it down.

It also seems to play games with memory. For some reason, I’m sure Timecrimes played at the Incredibly Strange Film Festival when I was managing the Paramount Theatre but the dates simply don’t line up! Maybe, I’m involved in a timeloop of my own – an anomaly that has to be fixed. That would explain a lot.

I wondered what Vigalondo had done since and saw that he made his Hollywood debut in 2016 with another brilliant concept – Colossal in which an alcoholic Anne Hathaway learns that her stumbling barroom antics are being mirrored by a giant monster in Korea.

Most recently, Vigalondo has been working with Taika Waititi on episodes of Our Flag Means Death – a perfect match of sensibilities.

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Where to watch Timecrimes

Worldwide Physical Media: Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment