Curator Watchlist
A tightly wound, low-budget time-travel thriller that turns a small setting into a nasty, clever paradox machine. It’s stressful, darkly funny, and admirably economical, with the kind of puzzle-box construction that rewards attention.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 32m
Director: Nacho Vigalondo
Starring: Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga
A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.
Nacho Vigalondo
Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga
A tightly wound, low-budget time-travel thriller that turns a small setting into a nasty, clever paradox machine. It’s stressful, darkly funny, and admirably economical, with the kind of puzzle-box construction that rewards attention.
Timecrimes is the rare time-travel movie that feels both simple and fiendishly engineered. By keeping the story confined to a small area and a short span of time, it turns a familiar sci-fi idea into a pressure cooker of escalating mistakes, dread, and grimly funny inevitability.
What makes it work is the precision of its construction. The film keeps tightening the screws as each new loop reveals another layer of cause and effect, and the result is less a flashy sci-fi spectacle than a suspense film built out of paradoxes.
It’s not especially interested in emotional warmth or big philosophical speeches. Instead, it delivers a lean, clever, and increasingly uncomfortable ride that should satisfy viewers who like their genre films smart, tense, and just a little mean.
Patrick Willems (4★) · 917 likes
Man time travel is cool but it seems SO stressful
Boy Roarbison [fka Nag Champion] (4.5★) · 593 likes
Near perfect. One of the best time-travel films I've seen, in part because of the juxtaposition of its intricate script & the simplicity of its setting. You would never guess that traveling only mere hours back in time would serve for such a compelling narrative, but "Timecrimes" pulls it off with brilliant pacing and a plot woven with intelligent twists, not ones that pander to its audience or insult their intelligence. Karra Elejalde [Hector] delivers a tremendously compelling lead performance[s], and
SilentDawn (4★) · 383 likes
Well that was cool, inventive, and moody! I can't believe I've never heard of this before.
Cellar Door L (3★) · 373 likes
Bro handle this matters in a worst possible way lmfao.
Sammy (3★) · 362 likes
in this movie, there’s two instances of a woman attempting to help an injured man that ends tragically for her. moral of story: don’t help men.
A famously intricate, low-budget time-travel puzzle that rewards close attention and shares the same cerebral, claustrophobic appeal.
A small-scale reality-bending thriller that builds dread from limited space, escalating confusion, and sharp causal logic.
A bleak, looping mystery with a similar sense of fatalism, repetition, and mounting psychological pressure.
Another paradox-driven time-travel story that leans into identity, inevitability, and elegant narrative trickery.
A grim, propulsive sci-fi thriller about fate and memory, with a strong sense of inevitability and disorientation.
A compact, high-concept loop thriller that turns repetition into suspense and steadily raises the stakes.
For viewers drawn to eerie time mechanics, melancholy atmosphere, and a story that feels like a puzzle with a dark heart.
A more melodramatic but thematically adjacent look at how tiny changes in time can spiral into catastrophe.
A contained thriller built around a strange temporal device and the paranoia that comes with seeing consequences before they happen.
A compact sci-fi loop film that shares the same interest in repetition, survival, and increasingly desperate problem-solving.
A low-key, unsettling genre film that uses circular structure and growing dread in a similarly patient way.
A more action-forward take on repetition and learning through failure, with the same satisfying escalation of cause and effect.
time travel paradoxes, causality and fate, identity confusion, escalating consequences, survival thriller, dark comedy, low-budget sci-fi, loop structure
science fiction, thriller, time loop, paradox, suspense, Spanish cinema, minimalist, dark humor, indie genre, psychological tension