Spanish stratagems: Timescrimes, King of the Hill

It is the province of smarter science fiction makers to invest as deep if not an even deeper sense of wonder in the simplest, most familiar apparatus as they would the monolithic machines of elaborate fantasy. In Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímines), a pair of binoculars becomes just such a vessel of intrigue. When Héctor (Karra Elejalde), having recently moved into his country house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernández), begins to explore the peripheries of his property with his binoculars, it is as though the bizarre, mind-boggling journey he will soon set upon has already begun. And of course, it has already begun.

The mysterious phone call; the sight of a pretty girl undressing in the woods; the upturned dumpster and abandoned bike by the side of the road; the mute, scissors-wielding maniac whose face is obscured by a pink bandage: all of these items which pull us so deftly into this story are luring the curious, casually voyeuristic Héctor into a trap whose genesis will prove unusually elusive, even by the standards of more synapse-sparking sci-fi. The chain of causality in Héctor’s spiral into misfortune, injury and alienation from his own existence remains to the very end impossible to trace back—though god knows Héctor himself tries arduously to figure it out.

Before I confuse you too much, let me clarify that Timecrimes is, as you might guess, a movie about time travel. (And before you read on, I'll warn you that it's kinda hard to decide what a spoiler is in Timecrimes, so read as your own discretion.) But rather than hurl its protagonist centuries into the past or eons into some far-flung future, Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s pretty ingenious and hugely sinister little feature debut tosses hapless Héctor a mere couple of hours back, which results in tremendous havoc. He catches sight of his own double doing everything he did two hours ago. He’s told by the mysterious lab technician (Vigalondo himself) who got him into this nightmare scenario, whose own motives are kept pretty obscure by the sweaty urgency of the story, not to interfere with what is, so to speak, deigned to pass. So Héctor, clumsy, middle-aged, overweight and easily exhausted, must run around frantically setting up reenactments of things that haven’t happened yet. Suffering from a persistent disconnect between seeing and being, he becomes tangled in a loop. The craziest part of it is that the avalanche of weird shit that got him into this mess is now rendered as echoes of their own internal continuum of events.

Newly out on DVD from Mongrel, Timecrimes is all action and often chillingly hilarious, a hybrid of an especially well-oiled The Twilight Zone episode and some especially physically taxing silent comedy. It manages to stay compelling even when you can see exactly where it’s going. Naysayers could make a case for it’s being a movie about little more than its own geometries. There’s talk of an American remake, and with the right talent—Cronenberg has been rumoured—I could certainly see how Vigalondo’s premise could be imbued with some darker layers of psychology. But you could just as easily laud the film for this very same sort of purity. It sets up an intricate network of activities that need to be fulfilled and deposits the utterly committed Elejalde into the thick of it like some poor, out-of-shape gerbil in some cosmically forbidding exercise wheel.

Like Héctor, Quim (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is an errant Spaniard who stumbles into the wrong place at the wrong time and winds up caught in a stratagem whose design or purpose is obscure. King of the Hill (El Rey de la montaña) begins with Quim getting robbed by some hot young babe (Maria Valverde) in the washroom of Spain’s most desolate gas station. At first it seems like he might be finding himself the antihero of some sexy, fatalistic rural neo-noir. He should be so lucky! By chasing after the girl and getting lost in some unpopulated mountain range, he’s actually slipping into a rethink of Deliverance or Duel, the randomly selected mark of some unseen maniac hunter with a rifle, scope, pooch and predilection for tormenting his prey.

King of the Hill is out on the Dimension Extreme DVD imprint, though I’m not sure what’s all that extreme about it save for a few particularly nasty looking wounds. Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego from a script by Javier Gullón, the film shares Timecrimes’ unfussy, action-oriented rigour but lacks its wit and eye for odd detial. López-Gallego uses the bleak location well and cranks up tension with his insistence on tight shots that fragment the action and disorient the viewer at precisely those moments when we’re grasping for some visual context. But while its simplicity can be read as a virtue, the film is so miserly with exposition that it risks long stretches given over to not much more than scrambling around, panting and crying out in pain and desperation and not much else. We do eventually get some hints at what sort of twisted creature has fixed Quim in its sights, but the little we do learn winds up feeling rather trite. Maybe it would have helped if Quim could have gone back in time and wound up with Don Siegel, or maybe John Boorman or Walter Hill in their 1970s prime as his puppet master.

Youth gone vile: Eden Lake

They set out for the weekend to some remote locale, where the placid water snuggles up against a beach that’s good for camping. The realization, only upon arrival, that this favourite spot from years ago has since been appropriated as stomping grounds for the rowdy teenage offspring of local yokels fails to dissuade them from pursuing their romantic getaway. But Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) are handsome middleclass Londoners—dare this horny young couple park their luxury Jeep and set up their tent amidst the unmistakably hostile country trash, marble-mouthed folk who don’t take kindly to outsiders, who above all look out for their own? Such actions are of course rarely advisable in horror flicks.

I rented it for the cover, which was slightly throwback in a good way, suitably gaudy, with the vague promise of atmospherics. The recent weeks haven’t yielded a whole lot of solid options for this column, so I did what I guess most people do, or at least those who still patronize video stores. With so many movies to see for work and a never-ending list of titles I’m hunting down based on my own nerdy obsessions, I don’t browse blind like I used to, but when I do I often wind up in the horror section, wondering to myself who the hell makes all these movies. In theory I love horror movies. I grew up on them. But there are so relatively few good ones, and only one way to find the genuine diamond in the rough. 

I won’t fool you. Eden Lake, the debut of British writer/director James Watkins, is no great shakes. It’s not one of these if-you-don’t-normally-go-for-horror crossover films. But it is quite interesting in its way, especially in the first third or so, and it is impressively creepy, especially in the middle, and though it does get really, really, dumb, it saves most the dumbest parts for the end, where coincidences pile up so high that this basically realistic narrative seems to be striving in vain to become boundless nightmare.

(A notable exception to the way I’ve divvied up the movie is a super-dumb moment that falls right smack-dab in the middle—and consider this a spoiler. It’s perhaps the most ludicrously bathetic scene of marriage proposal in history, with a beat-to-hell Steve sputtering on about honeymoons to India while a wound the size of an egg roll vomits little burps of blood from his side.)

Cinephiles will quickly see some or all of the bold-writ filmic precedents for Eden Lake’s narrative, and I figure they’re meant to. Before they even get into the woods to encounter the brats from hell, Steve begins to suffer a string of slights to his manhood. Jenny’s sweet about the whole thing, but really, shouldn’t he stand up to the rude hicks and impertinent punks and defend the honour of his extremely fetching female? The echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) resound loudly, and pleasingly, too, as it’s a story begging for renovation. I started to wonder if, once she inevitably assumed the role of protagonist—after all, that’s her, nubile and covered in muck, hiding behind a tree like Barbara Steele on the disc’s cover—would Jenny gradually take up the gauntlet of defender of property and bourgeois dignity in a clever gender reversal? The answer: Mmmm, sorta.

The other obvious model for this story is Deliverance (72), emphasized in the unabashedly classist depiction of rural folk as vicious xenophobes. Yet a peak sequence of sexual violation, so central to the hillbilly horror of Deliverance, and so seemingly inevitable in this equally tawdry scenario, is conspicuously absent, even when the teens actually have Jenny tied up and unconscious. Perhaps this is because Watkins sees these kids, whose leader is so completely vile, sadistic and devoid of any psychology as to be a sheer monster, as being so contaminated with violence that their hormones have actually been stunted into submission. Yet, rest assured, juvenile antics nonetheless rise to the fore, with the teens, apt and uncritical pupils of the modus operandi of Abu Ghraib, making videos with a phone of their acts of torture. This abstraction of aberrant behaviour through voyeuristic technology—and that technology’s capabilities for erasing or revising events after the fact—ultimately aligns the film, perhaps surprisingly, with either of the interchangeable versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (97/07), which shares with Eden Lake the peculiar quality of being at once truly terrifying and grotesque and silly, academic and numbing.

It’s worth pointing out that Reilly is pretty fearless. Even when the film demands that she slip at the drop of a hat to being a crazed animal hell-bent on revenge to a trembling griever for the retribution that befalls her tormentors—the film’s first scene lets us know that Jenny’s got a soft spot for kids—Reilly, who you might recognize from Mrs Henderson Presents (05) or Pride and Prejudice (05), dutifully fills out each moment with some sort of emotional logic. It’s really quite something. There should be some sort of Academy Award for valiant efforts toward salvaging the integrity of stuff like this.