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Fans of genre films – at least, the lucky ones in “select markets” - are getting an imported holiday treat this weekend with the release of Los Cronocrímenes (Timecrimes,) a nifty science-fiction film about an accidental time tourist. I say science fiction deliberately; this isn’t a whiz-bang sci-fi adventure with as many explosions as plot holes, just a modest and satisfying thriller based on a simple what-if premise: what if you went back an hour in time?

The protagonist, Hector, is an unlikely candidate for “the first vertebrate to travel through time”; he’s a middle-class, middle-aged husband settling into a new house. While scoping out the woods that abut his property he spots a young woman taking her top off. Quicker than you can say white rabbit, she disappears from sight. Hector feels driven to investigate. Well, wouldn’t you? After wandering through the woods a bit, Hector finds the mystery woman, now completely nude and apparently unconscious.

Before Hector can rouse her, he is attacked by a frightening stranger whose head is swathed in bloody bandages. Hector opts for the better part of valor and runs like hell, eventually stumbling upon a seemingly deserted research facility. But our hero finds a walkie-talkie and makes contact with a suspiciously nervous scientist who guides Hector to the perfect hiding place: an experimental time machine!

Roughly an hour later – oops, I mean an hour earlier – a startled Hector appears before the equally startled scientist. Still acting a bit oddly, the scientist gives Hector a terse warning about altering the timeline and instructs him to sit and wait until Hector’s past self enters the time machine, at which point he will become now-Hector. This gives our hero plenty of time to brood about the mysterious woman in the woods. Something bad happened to her – shouldn’t he prevent it? That couldn’t cause any harm, could it?

Oh boy, could it. The time traveler leaves the facility on a simple mission of mercy that spirals into the twelve labors of Hector and leaves him an exhausted mess. I won’t spoil anything that happens from this point, but suffice it to say that changing the past isn’t as easy as Hector assumes, and the harder he tries to do the right thing the more complex his situation gets.

Writer/director Nacho Vigalando explains to his cast when they will get paid.

Outside of Doctor Who, I’m not a big fan of time travel stories. Bad enough the tendency to use poorly-conceived time paradoxes as a peg on which to hang dumb action-adventure stories. But what really gets me is that time travel stories tend to rest on one of two uncomfortable premises: that everything is predetermined, or that absolutely everything is up for grabs. The first premise is an affront to anyone with an ego; I for one can’t accept it with the equanimity of Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan, the superhuman who can see the future and calmly says, “We’re all puppets…I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.” This idea informs many science fiction stories, from Heinlein’s novel By His Bootstraps to the films La Jetee and the Terminator series.

Unsettling as predestination may be, the second major possibility is even more disturbing. By going backwards in time you can prevent things from happening; you can not only kill someone, you can make it so they never even existed. That’s a cosmic existential horror that Lovecraft wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot tentacle. The foolish time travelers in Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “A Sound of Thunder,” for instance, travel back in time and accidentally step on a butterfly. This simple act initiates a long chain reaction across centuries, so that when the travelers return to their own time they find it unrecognizable. This idea was obliquely explored in the recent film Primer, in which the characters talk about revising an event, and in the DC comics universe time travel is often used to rewrite the fictional continuity.

Since I find neither of those possibilities to be very entertaining, I’m drawn to time travel stories that take a small-scale approach. ( I think Groundhog’s Day is one of the all-time great time travel movies.) One of the smart things about Timecrimes is that it doesn’t commit itself either way. Because the dialog is minimal, and there are no voice overs, we are left to wonder about why Hector does the things he does. Is he relentless in his determination to preserve the timeline because it’s impossible for him to do anything else, or simply because he’s afraid of consequences he can’t imagine? The movie seems to lean towards predetermination at the end, when Hector lets his last chance to change the past slip away; but perhaps at this point he’s just too beat down to think of a better idea.

Instead, the film has some grim fun with the practical problems incurred when you time travel. Do you talk to your past self? If not, how do you avoid him? In this way Timecrimes is reminiscent of David Gerrold’s short novel The Man Who Folded Himself, in which the time traveler must figure out how to deal with other versions of himself and eventually forms a sort of family with his doppelgangers and becomes his own lover. Though considering the grief poor Hector goes through, a better reference point might be Stanislaw Lem’s dizzying short story “The Seventh Voyage,” in which an astronaut caught in a time loop finds his spaceship filling up with irritable and irritating alternate versions of himself.

The other smart thing about the film is that we see it all through Hector’s perspective. This allows for surprises as we slowly learn the significance of every detail along the way, but without the confusing gotchas that Primer threw out. On the other hand the complexity of Primer rewards multiple viewings, while the pieces of Timecrime’s jigsaw puzzle slide together with as much clarity as precision. You won’t need to watch this one twice. But take it from Hector: sometimes it’s better not to go back.