New York City Horror Film Festival 2008

The highway in this long stretch of nowhere stretches for miles across a windy, barren landscape. The never-ending horizon seems to retreat the closer you get, and if a car broke down here it might take forever for someone to notice. In the midst of it, Officers Jack Bennett (Kent Harper) and Jim Conrad (French Stewart), sit dangerously bored and dreaming of the kind of glory that can only come with a serial killer or maniac on the loose. By the time Federal Officers Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) and Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) arrive the next day, a string of violent murders does in fact appear to be plaguing the lonely road. The police are straining at the bit to get back out and apprehend the murderers, but the Feds work differently. In order to uncover the truth of the case, Anderson and Hallaway first have to take their witnesses back—back to what happened when their lives intersected. A few details slowly emerge: Officers Bennett and Conrad were checking the horizon for speeders. Bobbi (Pell James) and Johnny (Mac Miller) were in the cherry Duster, tearing the highway up and having fun. Little Stephanie’s (Ryan Simpkins) family station wagon was cruising too, with her mom and new step-dad busy singing in the front seat and her brother David next to her in the back. The problem was, as Stephanie saw it, that adults never listen to little kids, no matter how many times she tried to tell them what she saw out the window. Perhaps if they had, it all would have turned out differently. As the Feds slowly expose the fragile little details each witness conceals so carefully with a well practiced lie, the ‘truth’ they are looking for starts to extract an enormous price no one expected.

Lauded short film director Nacho Vigalondo makes his feature debut with this tense, unstoppable vision of science and natural law gone awry. Hector (Karra Elejalde) is relaxing on a lawn chair outside of his new country home, surveying the nearby hillside through a pair of binoculars, when he catches sight of what appears to be a nude woman amidst the trees. Hiking up to investigate, he is attacked by a sinister figure whose head is wrapped in a grotesque, pink bandage. Fleeing in terror, he takes refuge in a laboratory atop the hill, where a lone attendant (director Nacho Vigalondo) ushers him in to a peculiar scientific contraption. He emerges what seems to be moments later, only to find that he has traveled back hours in time, setting in motion a brain-twisting, horrifying chain of events when he inadvertently runs into himself. Drawing from the best traditions of classic science fiction and crime fiction, TIMECRIMES plays games with the genre and the audience, giving the protagonist a Russian-doll like shell of identities that are shed so often that Hector can be playing one of any number of whodunit archetypes at any given moment as he becomes increasingly more complicit in the complicated mess that he’s trying to fix. Says director Vigalondo: "TIMECRIMES comes from my love of classic science fiction and crime stories. Writers like James Cain, Philip K. Dick, or directors like Fritz Lang. The idea of building a tragic paradox with such few elements is my attempt to going back to the classics and trying to bring back something new."