Working on the outskirts of horror and sci-fi for nearly two decades, Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo made his feature debut in 2007 with the independent film that provided the template for all his work to come. Timecrimes – newly released in a 4K UHD restoration by Vinegar Syndrome — is a low-budget exploration of an exceptionally bizarre time loop problem, deploying essentially no visual effects while telling an increasingly complex tale of a man trapped in a temporal paradox who keeps creating new versions of himself.
The film stars Karra Elejalde as Hector, a man whose strange journey begins when he spies a partially naked woman in the forest behind his house. As Hector goes to investigate, he’s attacked and stabbed by a man wearing bloody bandages on his face. The confounding plot escalates from there, as Hector stumbles upon a building housing a time machine and, at the behest of a scientist played by Vigalondo himself, travels back one hour in time, triggering a chain of events that soon finds at least three versions of Hector helplessly attempting to stop the causal spiral he’s trapped in.
