2. Timecrimes
Original Title: Los Cronoscrimenes Most high profile Hollywood time travel films struggle with all kinds of paradoxes and tie themselves in knots trying to make sense of timelines as they cross over themselves. Those selfsame knots, though, are the basis of tightly plotted sci-fi thriller Timecrimes, where the inevitability of being trapped in a series of events already predestined because they have already happened is the story that drives the movie. Made for a tiny budget and set in the Spanish countryside, Timecrimes has a cast of five, a handful of locations and barely any special effects, but engages its audience in its time looping narrative in a way that much more expensive movies can only dream of. Nacho Vigalonda writes, directs and appears as the scientist who has developed an experimental time travel device. His story and direction are simple and immediate, giving the movie a sense of focus and urgency. Timecrimes begins like an offbeat slasher film as protagonist Hector finds himself bafflingly stalked and stabbed by a sinister man whose whole face is covered in pink bandages. Fleeing from his voiceless pursuer, Hector breaks into the scientist's home and the scientist offers him a hiding place in his strange machine. Emerging hours earlier, a panicked Hector gets a completely different perspective on the earlier events. The seemingly simple narrative becomes more complex from there, but the small scale and cast mean that Vigalonda has the ability to keep everything coherent even while new time streams are introduced. Smartly plotted in a way that efficiently creates crises and solutions constantly, Timecrimes is one of the few time travel movies really to run with the idea of a coherent and complete time loop.
See this if you liked: Ultra low budget time travel formed the basis of US indie headscratcher Primer, a film made with more love of physics than narrative and therefore a bit of a love it or hate it experience. However, the closest recent equivalent to Timecrimes' horror of being trapped in an inevitable time loop is Triangle, the underrated British ocean going haunting story from Severance and Black Death director Christopher Smith.