Time Travel Horror
Double Feature - The House at the End of Time/Timecrimes
This wasn't the double feature I intended to watch this
weekend. I had a plan to do Horror
Comedy with a double bill of Things We Do
In the Shadows and Tucker and Dale vs
Evil. Then I saw that TWDitS becomes
available on Netflix on the 10th, so I decided to hold off in a fit of
fiduciary responsibility.
This was a pretty late-in-the-game decision, and I felt like
I needed to watch SOMETHING. I figured I'd brainstorm a theme later on and
watch something on my queue to tide me over. That film was The House at the End of Time - something I added to my list solely
on the basis of the neat title. Once I realized what the concept was (and
surely the title should have given me some indication) I realized I could actually
form a theme with this and Timecrimes.
I had a vague idea of adding Triangle,
but I ran out of time (sorry) - and this way it actually becomes a Spanish Language Time Travel Horror Double
Feature, which is somehow cooler. I can't articulate how it's cooler - but
it is.
It's tough to discuss time-travel films without giving stuff
away, as the orientation of scenes is often integral to the plot. So I may hide
some details behind spoiler blocks, though this is not something I usually do.
The House at the End
of Time
This was a cool little surprise of a film for me, as I had
heard nothing about it whatsoever. It's billed as the first Venezualen horror
movie and if it's any indication of the level of quality we can expect in
future films than I look forward to more.
The film is concerned primarily with two frames of time.
There's the present (of 2011) , where we follow the life of Dulce, a woman who
was jailed 30 years ago for the crime of murdering her husband and presumably
her son, though his body was never found. She's been returned to her house,
where those events occurred, as a form of house arrest - this is apparently a
'benefit' afforded to elderly prisoners. It also seems very much like an
additional form of punishment.
The second time frame is 30 years prior, and deals with the
days running up to the events that lead to Dulce's incarceration. Because the
film starts in-media-res we know that Dulce is not a murderess and that
something very strange happened to her son, Leo. Something or someone grabbed him
and took him into a large sub-basement. There are no exits from that strange
labyrinth, but he could not be found.
 |
| Kind of a fixer-upper. |
For much of the early parts of the film it feels more like a
melodrama, with a family in conflict. Dulce has married an older man, Juan Jose,
and their marriage is one of disappointment, accusations, avoidance and one
terrible secret. There are actually two boys, with Leo being the older son and
Rodrigo the younger. There is conflict between them as well, with Leo
struggling to be the more grown-up and responsible one. He resents his younger
brothers closeness with their mother, as well as his success at baseball and his friendship with a young
girl.
In the present the now elderly Dulce is visited by the local
priest, who runs an orphanage. He wants to know what really happened and
becomes Dulce's friend and confidant as she begins to tell him the truth about
what happened all those years ago.
And what happened is complicated. Strange things began to
occur in the house - a figure moves from room to room, a hand appears in a
doorway, and someone gives Leo a note to pass on to his mother. A note that
says that Juan Jose will kill their children.
The escalation of creepiness is handled really well and is
echoed in strange events that begin to happen in the present. The house, it
turns out, was abandoned by the original owner - an architect and Freemason - many years ago and appropriated by the state. In
fact - as the priest discovers - many people have disappeared within the house
over the years. An old man with a knife starts to appear and the numbers
11-11-11-11 appear in blood on a mirror.
In the past a tragic accident results in the death of the
young Rodrigo. In the aftermath Juan Jose discovers Dulce's secret, and it's
one that pushes him over the edge.
Things begin to escalate and move toward an intense but
satisfying climax that had me teary eyed in a few spots, even though a number
of plot elements were telegraphed well ahead of time. The ending was overtly
maudlin, but I didn't really care - I'd totally bought in by that point.
SPOILER (use mouse to select the below to see the spoiler text)
The gist of the setup is that once every 10 years, on
November 11th at 11pm 11 minutes 11 seconds the house comes unstuck in time,
and the occupants can move back - visiting times long past and, sometimes,
bringing things back to their present. Of course the presence moving about the
house, leaving messages and - in the end - killing Juan Jose and bringing her
son to the present day. There are a lot of things that seem like coincidences
that aren't (and a lot of actual coincidences that clutter things up and
stretch credulity - but like I said, I totally bought in, so they didn't really
bother me). It all fits together really nicely, as a good time-travel story
should, and if it became a little predictable after a while, it was still well
handled.
The director and screenwriter, Alejandro Hidalgo, likes to
present us with before/after images. We see a lot of the same framing for
scenes set in the different time frames, with dissolves or simple cuts showing
us the same thing in the past and in the present. The story and
characterizations are well done and the acting - even for the kids - is above
average.
I really enjoyed this and I can't think of many horror films
where I've had a 'dust in my eye' reaction to the course of events. It may not
surprise you with its twists and turns, but it's still a good story.
I saw Timecrimes a
while ago - and I may be mis-remembering, but I think it was from a
recommendation during a previous 31 Days, 31 Horror Movies. I remember enjoying
it a lot and was really looking forward to watching it again.
A small issue I had this time around was that the version on
Amazon is dubbed, not subtitled. It was fairly well done, but I still vastly
prefer to hear the original tone and cadence of the actors when watching a film
in a foreign language. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the dubbing for the
main character, which lent him a more nebishy and plaintive tone than I
remember from the first viewing. This lead directly to a distinctly different
reading of the film for me. The first time I watched it I was somewhat
empathetic towards Hector, really feeling his desperation and confusion - this
time I was annoyed by him early on and lost what little sympathy I had before
he'd even got out of the time machine the first time.
 |
| Time Machine. Not hot tub. |
Oh, yeah - there's a time machine.
Let me backtrack. So there's this shlumpy guy, Hector, who
is renovating his home along with his wife. As he's relaxing n his backyard
with his binoculars (as you do) he spots a young woman in the woods, disrobing.
After his wife leaves on an errand, Hector walks up into the woods looking for
the woman.
Now this is one of those moments where my perception has
changed due to my reaction to the dubbing. In the first viewing I was fairly
sure that Hector was concerned about the girl - that he saw something that made
him think she was in trouble. This time around I felt like he was just being a
voyeur, that he was hoping to get a closer look. I don't know if either
impression is the correct one - it's just a noted change in my own viewing this
time around.
He does find the girl, unconscious and nude, and is then
savagely attacked by a figure in a coat, face wrapped in pink bandages. He
flees, coming to an empty research facility. He finds a walky-talky and
communicates with an engineer who is working at another building. Told that the
bandaged man is coming he flees to the engineer who talks him into hiding in a
strange device.
And then he goes back in time. And of course THAT goes well.
 |
| Peekaboo! |
I still really enjoy the plot, and how well constructed all
the events are. I mean, I've seen it
before and yet I still forgot things. Because of course Hector has screwed
things up, and because he's gone back in time he thinks he has a chance to fix
it all. Except that's not how time works - at least not in this movie - and the
things he has to do and how he has to do them keep him on a path that spirals
inevitably towards disaster and death.
 |
| Just keep biking, lady - it's not worth the hassle. |
That the whole thing revolves around time travel would seem
like a plot giveway (but the title should have already gone a long way towards
that), but it's not the most important part of the movie. It's that flailing
against what should be an inevitability - the attempt to work around events
that are already in place in order to fix things without changing them - that
provides the real motivation of the film. (And again - the dubbing meant that I
didn't really get the urgency when the engineer explains that if he changes
anything in the past that he could cease to exist. Instead I was constantly
wondering why he didn't just do things differently - only to remember 'oh yeah'
he might inadvertently kill himself.)
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