Mind-Melting, R-Rated Sci-Fi Thriller Makes Every Decision Worse Than The Last

By Robert Scucci
| Published 24 seconds ago

I’ve been making a conscious effort to check out more foreign-language films because it’s interesting to see how other cultures play with the tropes I’ve grown bored with stateside. I made this decision after watching 2017’s Veronica and its prequel, 2023’s Sister Death, which both serve as perfectly terrifying Spanish-language analogs to The Conjuring film series while still doing enough of their own thing to make you want more. The worldbuilding is top-tier in the sense that the lore explained everything you needed to know, but not in such a heavy-handed way that it overstayed its welcome.

My search ultimately led me to another Spanish-language film, 2007’s Timecrimes, which follows similar logic to low-budget sci-fi thrillers from the US like Primer (2004), Coherence (2013), Empathy, Inc.(2018), and Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox (2024). All of these films are cut from the same cloth, but offer their own unique blends of existential dread in the face of free will and determinism, making you wonder who’s really in control of the situation. None of them offer clean answers either, which makes them perfect to revisit as you search for clues you may have missed the first time around.

Hector And His Duplicates

Timecrimes is a time-loop thriller where a man named Hector (Karra Elejalde) finds himself reliving the same few hours of his life on repeat, each time making matters worse for himself. His strange foray into the unknown begins while renovating his new house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernandez), who’s so busy unpacking and tending to the garden that she doesn’t initially realize anything is off.

When Hector sees a woman stripping naked in the nearby forest (Barbara Goenaga), he sets out to investigate. It’s not that he’s a peeping tom or anything creepy like that. He also notices somebody else in the woods and has reason to believe she might be in danger. After their first encounter, where he finds her nude, seemingly lifeless body, he runs off after spotting a strange man whose face is wrapped in bandages.

Fearing for his life, Hector runs toward a nearby building, where he communicates with a nameless scientist (Nacho Vigalondo) running a series of unsanctioned experiments over the weekend. The scientist stuffs Hector into what looks like a sensory deprivation tank but is actually a time machine. Hector emerges from the tank an hour earlier on the timeline and quickly realizes he may need to prevent the incident that led him to the building in order to restore some sense of balance.

The scientist, now referring to him as Hector 2, insists that he stay put and let the next hour play out as it originally did. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, Hector 2 runs off and tries to intervene with the girl and the masked man, only to learn the man’s origins, which adds another layer of confusion. The cycle continues in Timecrimes with a third Hector materializing, and this time Hector 2 is certain that Clara is in danger. Not quite sure how badly things will unravel if he keeps interfering, Hector 2 takes his chances, and it’s all but guaranteed he’s not going to like what happens next.

A Low-Budget, High-Concept Thriller 

Sharing the same DNA as the thrillers I mentioned earlier, Timecrimes stands on its own thanks to its willingness to trust the audience and let events unfold naturally. There are no heavy exposition dumps outside of the scientist laying out the most basic time travel logic we need to follow. Most of the suspense comes from Hector trying to recreate events to control the narrative, even as he realizes he has no real control over anyone’s actions, even if those actions are coming from slightly earlier versions of himself.

The amount of care Hector puts into not breaking the space-time continuum, even while suspecting that fate will play out the same way regardless, makes his journey all the more unnerving. There’s a lingering sense that he may have been stuck in this loop far longer than we realize, and we’re only witnessing one iteration of a much larger cycle. With that possibility in play, it becomes nearly impossible to pinpoint where the story truly begins, where it ends, or whether it’s meant to land on a clean conclusion at all.

As of this writing, Timecrimes is streaming for free on Tubi.