Timecrimes

Héctor leads an ordinary life with his wife, Clara, at their home outside the city. One evening he spots a young woman in the woods nearby and goes to investigate. There he is attacked by a stranger whose face is wrapped in bloodstained bandages, and while fleeing he stumbles into a scientific facility, where a machine sends him roughly an hour back in time. Coming face to face with his earlier self sets off a chain of disasters whose consequences he cannot foresee.

Timecrimes is the 2007 Spanish science fiction thriller that marked Nacho Vigalondo's debut as a feature director. He wrote the screenplay and also appears in the cast as El Joven, alongside Karra Elejalde as Héctor, Candela Fernández as Clara and Bárbara Goenaga as the woman in the woods. The film runs 93 minutes and was made for about 3 million dollars. Vigalondo went on to direct The ABCs of Death, V/H/S: Viral, Open Windows, Colossal and Daniela Forever.

Audience response has been consistently positive: on IMDb it holds 7.1/10 from more than 67,000 votes, and on TMDB it stands at 7/10 from over 1,500 votes. A critics' rating of 7.1/10 from 71 reviews places professional opinion in line with the general audience, suggesting a genre film that satisfies both casual viewers and reviewers. Its modest budget relative to its lasting visibility points to a debut that found a wide audience beyond its home country.