Sending ripples through reality

Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo describes his feature debut, “Timecrimes,” as a toy -- “something the audience can play with.”

The award-winning film, which opens Friday, is a sci-fi thriller and a time-traveling film noir, with a dash of dark humor added for good measure. To wit: the movie’s time machine, which resembles a giant egg.

“We didn’t want to make this beautiful time machine,” says the 31-year-old Vigalondo, who also wrote and costars in the film. “We wanted to make it feel like the ‘50s or the ‘70s. We wanted to make it a giant toy. . . . Somehow it’s also the nature of the filmmaker -- you are also playing with giant toys.”

“Timecrimes” -- or “Los Cronocrimenes,” as originally titled in Spanish -- centers on Hector (Karra Elejalde), a middle-aged man staying at a country house nestled in the woods of northern Spain with his companion Clara (Candela Fernandez). Hector is something of a voyeur, because when he returns home after an errand, he sits in the backyard with his binoculars to explore the woods. His eye soon catches movement in a clearing -- a beautiful young woman taking off her clothes.

He decides to check out the babe in the woods, but when he finds the girl, she’s dead. Then, Hector is attacked by a strange man with a long coat and a bandaged head who stabs him in the arm.

Hector flees to a nearby research lab, where he meets a scientist named Chico (Vigalondo), who agrees to hide him in a weird contraption -- a time machine. When Hector emerges, he’s has gone back an hour in time and can see his earlier self sitting in the backyard with the binoculars.

Despite the scientist’s protestations, Hector decides to stop the death of the young woman and find out who stabbed him -- the consequences of which give new meaning to the old adage “You can’t go home again.”

“For me, making this movie was a passion,” says Vigalondo, who received an Oscar nomination five years ago for his live-action short comedy “7:35 in the Morning.” “I am a lover of science fiction -- I love Philip K. Dick.”

Just as with Dick’s stories, Vigalondo wanted “Timecrimes” to push filmgoers. “Sometimes when I go into movies, you can feel that there is a fear of challenging the audience,” he says. “Sometimes you can feel this fear in science-fiction movies. I wanted to make a movie without this fear.”

And he wanted the film to have some humor -- especially with Hector’s bumbling when he emerges from the time machine. “Most of my short films are little comedies,” he says.

“ ‘Timecrimes’ is the first thing I have made that’s not an open comedy, but you can find a lot of comedic elements in the film. When you are dealing with time travel and this kind of stuff, you have to be smart, you are supposed to be clever. But my first worry was not making a boring film.”

With a small budget, Vigalondo knew his writing would be the film’s major special effect. “All my efforts went into the script,” he says. “Anyway, the shooting was pretty complicated.”

In fact, he says, “This is my little first film, but it is also my little ‘Apocalypse Now.’ ”

Vigalondo shot the movie in northern Spain, where he grew up -- and where he received funding. “You have to shoot where you are given the money,” he says. “The problem came with the weather. We had a hurricane in the middle of the night, and it destroyed all the sets. We had to start it all again.”

Despite the movie being his passion, the filmmaker says he won’t be involved with an American version of “Timecrimes.” The rights to it have already been sold, with director David Cronenberg and producer Steve Zaillian attached.

That’s fine with Vigalondo. “I don’t want to go back in time and make the film again,” he says, laughing.

--

susan.king@latimes.com