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Los Cronocrímenes (English: Timecrimes) is a 2007 Spanish science fiction film, written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, and starring Karra Elejalde, Bárbara Goenaga and Vigalondo himself.

Hector is moving into a new house. While his wife, Clara, is out buying dinner, Hector sees something in the woods behind the house and goes to investigate. He finds an unconscious, naked woman and is then attacked by a masked man in a black coat. Fleeing further into the woods, Hector takes refuge in a seemingly empty laboratory and meets the one technician remaining on the premises after-hours. The technician convinces Hector to hide in a machine. As suggested by the film's title, this device turns out to be a Time Machine that sends Hector an hour into the past.

Then, it gets worse.


This film provides examples of:

  • Alone with the Psycho: The girl in the forest is convinced to follow Hector deeper into the forest for a ways until he turns on her, prevents her from leaving, and demands that she strip.
  • Badass Longcoat: Bandaged Hector 2 picks up a coat from the trash which makes him look even scarier.
  • Bandaged Face: The mysterious masked man has his face covered in pink bandages. It's Hector 2, who suffered a head wound during a car accident and used the bloodstained bandages for his head.
  • Beeping Computers: The one in the lab makes sounds as the numbers change on the monitor.
  • Blind Shoulder Toss: In the woods, Hector 3 casually tosses the walkie-talkie over his shoulder once he's delivered his message to the technician. He does the same for the scissors in the final scene.
  • Cell Phones Are Useless: The girl gets no signal on her cell phone, preventing her from simply calling for help.
  • Chekhov's Gun: A rare case of the item getting used before it's established: Hector gets stabbed by the scissors before he picks them up, knowing that he'll have to use them to stab himself later. The trope is played more conventionally when Hector pulls them back out of his pocket at the end of the film to cut the girl's hair so she'll resemble Clara.
  • Crowbar Combatant: Hector 3 used a crowbar to force the technician into submission.
  • E = MC Hammer: The lower lab Hector enters has blackboards full of scientific formulas.
  • Establishing Character Moment: Before going to investigate the woman in the forest, Hector is repeatedly established to be a lazy lump of a man. He arrives at his home with groceries spilling out of the open trunk of his car, takes a nap in the afternoon, tries to get his wife to answer the phone while she is doing yard work, and then acts like picking up dinner is too exhausting of a task for him.
  • Fakeout Escape: When Hector 2 searches his house, he finds a ladder outside the window and believes that Bicycle Girl escaped that way. However, the ladder was placed there by Hector 3 to distract his past self.
  • Fan Disservice: Looking through his binoculars, Hector sees a braless young woman taking her T-shirt off. Sexy! Then we see the scene again: she's being forced to remove her shirt by Hector 2. The camera looks away from her this time around.
  • Foreshadowing: The girl in the forest wears a shirt depicting a graphic of Schrödinger's Cat. It is then revealed throughout the film that she plays a similar role to Schrödinger's cat as Hector's perspective of her fate changes depending on the time loop. In the first time loop, Hector 1 discovers her unconscious body in the forest and doesn't know if she is dead or alive. In the second time loop, Hector 2 returns to the same spot at a later time but doesn't find the body, subsequently realizing that she is still alive. In the third time loop, Hector 3 maintains the Stable Time Loop by disguising the girl as his wife before leading her to her death.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: When Hector first enters the laboratory, there's a brief shot of a computer screen that reads "Time Machine Configuration Interface".
  • Future Me Scares Me: Or, more precisely, Future Me stabs Present Me in the arm with scissors, and chases Present Me around a forest, causing Present Me to end up in the time machine in the first instance.
  • Future Self Reveal: Hector is antagonized by a bandaged stranger in the woods before accidentally traveling back in time and becoming him.
  • Genre Blind: Hector is clearly unfamiliar with even the concept of time travel and seems to regard his past self as a completely separate person. He gets smarter pretty quickly though.
  • Idiot Ball: The youth knows full well that time travel is a Stable Time Loop and has to coach Hector several times that he can't change what has already happened. And yet he also tries to prevent Hector 3 from using the time machine even though he already watched Hector 3 do so. This is purely to create some additional drama.
  • Informed Attractiveness: Hector remarks that the girl in the forest is beautiful shortly before sending her to her death. This is presumably his guilty conscience over his actions.
  • The Law of Conservation of Detail: Adhered to thoroughly.
  • Male Gaze: The girl in the forest is conveniently subjected to a number of lingering shots of her naked body, which proves to be the catalyst for the story, driving Hector's interest in wandering around the forest to begin with.
  • Minimalist Cast: The cast consists of Hector, Clara, the bandaged man (who is Hector), the girl on the road, the man who runs Hector off the road (who is also Hector), and the technician.
  • Mood Whiplash: The final scene is very bleak. Then the credits roll, with Blondie's "Picture This" playing over them.
  • Ms. Fanservice: The beautiful Barbara Goenaga spends a lot of her screentime naked, though under very creepy circumstances.
  • My Future Self and Me: Three Hectors interact with each other.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The girl in the forest gets involved purely as a good samaritan and ends up getting terrified, brutalized and killed as a result. That none of this was done with criminal intent is hardly of any consolation.
  • No Name Given: The girl in the forest and the technician are never named. They're billed as "the girl in the forest" and "the youth."
  • Now What?: It is indeed very interesting what Hector is going to say to the police arriving during the very last scene regarding the presence of the dead body and his extremely bruised face. Not that he seemed to care much by then, anyway.
  • Once More, with Clarity: Observing the girl stripping nude is quite surprising to the audience (as well as to the hero) at first. The scene starts to make (some) sense only later when we switch the perspective and get the bigger picture.
  • "Psycho" Strings: Play in the suspenseful scene when Hector runs uphill to the lab chased by a psycho (or so he thinks).
  • The Reveal: A few of them. The biggest one comes at the end when we realize that the body is not of Clara but the girl.
  • Rewatch Bonus: On second viewing, the Chase Scene in which Hector 1 runs to the silo to escape from the bandaged man is, in reality, a humorous sequence of him running from nothing since Hector 2 arrives at the silo just seconds before performing the Cat Scare at the window.
  • Shameful Strip: The woman in the forest is forced to strip by Hector, purely because he already saw it happen and needs to keep the time loop stable.
  • Stable Time Loop: How time travel works in the film. Most of the early events in the film have no author. Hector must do them because he saw them done earlier.
  • Temporal Paradox: Of the "ontological paradox" variety. The whole film. Essentially, Hector 3 is the one who gets the whole thing started, but Hector 1 has to have gone back in time to make a Hector 3 in the first place.
  • Tricked Out Time: What Hector probably thinks he's doing. In reality, though...
  • Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: While Clara isn't as young and flawless as the girl in the forest, she's quite a bit more attractive then her schlubby lump of a husband, Hector.
  • Villain Protagonist: Hector is ready to let people die to maintain the time loop.
  • Wham Line: "You weren't the first to leave the machine."
  • You Already Changed the Past: The central premise. Even after Hector starts to pick up on the reason for the things he's doing, he's often simply following what he watched himself do before.

Alternative Title(s): Timecrimes

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