In the early evening, Hector figures he deserves a little break from moving into his new house and retires to his lawn chair in the backyard. He won't have traveled more than a mile from this spot before he falls into a spinning wheel of existentialist dread--a stunning nightmare that pushes RASHOMON-style multiple-perspective storytelling so far past its outer limits that it flips into its very inverse. Through his binoculars, Hector spies something in the nearby trees--it appears to be a woman undressing. Hector's inevitable investigation results in a bizarre but fleeting encounter with a terrifying figure wrapped in pink head bandages, followed by an intense escape that takes him to a strange silo which houses a mysterious machine. The events that "follow," to use a term loosely, make for what might be the most flawless time-travel story in the history of movies. Where BACK TO THE FUTURE, TERMINATOR, and most other beloved time-tampering films are accepted only because they fudge the implications of causality in an entertainingly forgivable way, the Spanish-language TIMECRIMES does no fudging; it simply hurtles its audience into an unnerving thought experiment and, from there, never submits to a significant break in logic.

Propelled by mesmerizing déjà vu, twisted yet camouflaged tragicomedy, and a low-key sense of queasy dread, this TWILIGHT ZONE-ready tale effortlessly transforms its rather mundane setting into a disturbingly surreal landscape. There is nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the grassy yards in which the movie takes place; it's just that they're lit by the kind of natural twilight of dusk--at once familiar and strange--that makes everything seem as if it's playing out in the mind's soundstage. Through its subtle, uncommon characterization, TIMECRIMES deftly reconciles its temporal-mind meditations with an eerie account of a loving man who acts in spite of himself.