The mind-bending paradox of Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007)

Roughly speaking, there are two general types of time travel stories. In one, time travel is essentially a plot device to move a character to a different setting, where he or she can have some kind of adventure, often also providing an opportunity for social comment or satire – the primary text here is H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine; it’s also the narrative motor for the BBC’s long-running Doctor Who (1963-). The other strain takes the conceptual implications of time travel as its subject, exploring the paradoxes which must arise from the idea of time as one of the universe’s physical dimensions, with past, present and future in some manner existing simultaneously. These stories have to invent various rules in order to contain their stories in manageable ways, some more plausible than others. (I’ve never quite understood the common trope that time travellers must avoid meeting themselves in another part of the time stream because any contact with an exact duplicate will produced the equivalent of a matter/antimatter explosion – since at different points in our lives we are actually constituted by different atoms, we’ll never be identical material entities, but rather more like “twins”.)

These stories are a form of intellectual play, the fun being in how their creators manage the brain-twisting possibilities of the concept. One well-trodden path is the idea that movement through time duplicates an individual and disconnection from roots in one specific time undermines a sense of identity – the latter seems quite logical since who we are and who we feel ourselves to be are a product of our continuous temporal experience. I first encountered the former point in David Gerrold’s 1973 novel (really more of a lengthy novella) The Man Who Folded Himself, in which the protagonist multiplies exponentially as he jumps through time; eventually, he becomes a female version of himself, with whom he has a child who turns out to be himself while he also becomes the uncle who once gave him the means to travel in time… This was new to me, but is actually an elaboration on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 story “All You Zombies” (skilfully adapted in 2014 by the Spierig brothers as Predestination), which itself expands on elements from 1941’s “By His Bootstraps”.

The identity conundrum is endlessly fascinating, being used by storytellers less interested in the superficial paradoxes which have proliferated in movies like Cyborg 2087 (1966), the Back to the Future trilogy (1985-90), Star Trek IV (1986) and Timecop (1994). While most time travel stories tend to fall apart the more closely you examine them, the game is undeniably fun – how would cause and effect work if you could go to the past or future? Say you could go back and kill Hitler as a child so that the Second World War never happened and the 20th Century developed in radically different ways – would the you who had gone back and killed him ever actually have existed? If not, you wouldn’t have been able to go back and kill him, so history would have followed the course we’re familiar with, in which case you would have existed and could have gone back to kill him … and so on in an endlessly impossible loop.

This looping conundrum is the focus of Nacho Vigalondo’s rigorous chamber piece Timecrimes (2007), which plays out over a few hours with only four characters – or six, if you count the additional two versions of the protagonist. This is Héctor (Karra Elejalde), a comfortable middle class man who lives with his wife Clara (Candela Fernández) in a large house overlooking a small wooded valley. Arriving home from the supermarket, he decides to take a nap while Clara does some gardening. He’s disturbed by an odd phone call, and goes outside to relax in a lawn chair, surveying the woods with a pair of binoculars. Clara leaves on an errand and he sees something odd – a woman partly concealed in the woods, who for some reason lifts her shirt to expose her breasts. He also glimpses something else which he can’t quite make out.

And so he walks down into the woods to get a closer look. The unnamed woman (“the woman in the woods”, Bárbara Goenaga), now naked, lies unconscious against a rock. As he kneels beside her, a figure whose head is wrapped in a bloody bandage attacks him, cutting his arm, and Héctor flees. He finds his way to a seemingly deserted facility; hiding from the bandaged man, he hears a voice on a walkie-talkie and is told urgently to make his way up the hill to another building before the bandaged man catches up with him. In this other other building, a high-tech lab of some kind, a nervous technician (“the young man”, played by Vigalondo himself) tells him to hide in a tank of milky liquid – which seems rather odd, but when the bandaged man appears at the window, he quickly complies … and emerges to an explanation that can’t help but confuse him; he’s been sent back in time briefly.

He tries calling home and finds himself on the other end of the odd call which had woken him from his nap. Looking across the valley with his binoculars, he sees his earlier self with Clara in the garden – and interprets this as an imposter. After all, his own experience of the afternoon has been an uninterrupted progression. Wanting to get back to protect Clara, he takes a vehicle and on the road passes a young woman on a bicycle before being run off the road and injuring his head. Bleeding, he wraps his head in a bandage before the woman appears to see if he’s okay.

And here the cause-and-effect paradox kicks in; he leads the woman into the woods and threatens her, forcing her to expose her breasts to attract the attention of the Héctor in the lawn chair, thus precipitating the events we’ve already seen from Héctor 1’s perspective. What’s disturbing here is how quickly and easily the dislocation experienced by Héctor 2 prompts him to commit acts which would never have occurred to him in the normal course of life. The casual cruelty he inflicts on this unknown woman seems against what little we know of the character, arising from the disconnection and confusion he’s experiencing as he confronts the existence of his doppelganger.

From here, we see the events of the first act again, but this time from Héctor 2’s perspective as he deliberately manipulates Héctor 1 to act out exactly what we’ve already seen. The problem he faces is how to break out of the loop and get back to his “normal” life. This involves yet another jump and the creation of a third Héctor – who not only turns out to be the instigator of the first loop, setting all these events in motion, but also escalates the cruelty, sacrificing the unknown young woman in order to restore the “natural” progression of time and his life with Clara. And yet, he’s no longer Héctor; he’s Héctor 3, at two removes from his original self and fully aware of his own capacity to commit horrific crimes – the veneer of bourgeois complacency has been stripped away, his sense of self irrevocably changed.

The impossible folding of cause and effect raises irresolvable questions – in order for the story’s events to occur as we see them, they have to have occurred already – but Vigalondo constructs his puzzle with brilliant efficiency. A conceptual game to be sure, but as we watch it unfold its internal logic is unshakable. To help viewers get their heads around the paradox, Umbrella’s limited edition Blu-ray also includes a “chronological” cut in which rather than showing the three loops in sequential order, they are layered onto each other so that the interactions of the three Héctors are displayed from all perspectives simultaneously. Although this cut is occasionally a little rough (after all, it wasn’t shot to be displayed this way), it confirms that Vigalondo plays fair within the conceptual parameters of the narrative.

For anyone with a taste for time travel paradoxes, Timecrimes is essential viewing, a fascinating, darkly funny exploration of the fragility of identity which is also a mind-bendingly entertaining intellectual puzzle. It’s definitely my favourite movie in this genre.

The disk also includes a commentary and interview with Vigalondo, a lengthy behind-the-scenes documentary, cast and crew interviews, a featurette on an Internet game version of the movie, and Vigalondo’s Oscar-nominated short film 7:35 de la mañana (2003). There’s also a poster, a set of lobby cards and a booklet with essays and poster art.

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The Mr. Zod YouTube channel has a couple of interesting recent videos about the “mechanics” of time travel and about how they’ve been used in various movies.

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A couple of decades ago, I wrote my own time travel paradox story as a treatment for a movie I wanted to make – which needless to say never happened. Here, for the record, it is: