Fantastic Fest Report: Diary of the Dead, Hell’s Fever, Timecrimes, The Ferryman

As much as anything, that’s because Vigalondo was not overly ambitious. In this case, that’s high praise. There’s no getting around it: Timecrimes is a time travel movie, and time travel movies are inherently schematic and can become a burden to watch as you try and juggle the multiple paradoxes in your head.

Vigalondo avoids that trap. Yes, the paradoxes and puzzles get a heavy duty work-out, but they are the sort that tease without overly torturing the mind. Hector moves into a new home with his wife. In the late afternoon, he is sitting on the lawn idly looking through his binoculars when he spies a beautiful young woman in the nearby woods taking off her shirt. All the way off. Just at the moment, his wife asks for the car keys so she can run into town on an errand. She leaves, and Hector, feeling a bit of a rush from the sight he has seen, heads into the woods to try and have another look at the girl.

Instead, he is ensnared on a tightly-coiled adventure that unravels his life. Vigalondo moves the narrative along with a nicely varied pace and an urgent tempo. Karra Elejalde is exceptional as Hector, an ordinary man who is caught up with forces that may or may not be beyond his control. The director himself convincingly plays a key role as a scientist.

The script is well-structured and feels very intimate. And Vigalondo quickly draws the audience into Hector’s dilemma, and through the twists and turns of the plot, you can’t help but feel more and more empathy for his plight. With a minimal budget, Vigalondo shot a film that looks lovely and provides a welcome layer of emotion on top of the well-handled genre mechanics.

Vigalondo was also very engaging in a post-screening Q&A. The cut we saw was only finalized a week before, and he would still like to finalize a few things, but it is very strong as is. He noted that time travel movies tend to fall into two categories: ones where the past can be changed, and ones where the past cannot be changed, despite the actions of the protagonist. He said he favors the latter.

He remembered actor Karra Elejalde from a film he made in 1993 called The Dead Mother. Vigalondo loved the mother and the character played by Elejalde. He contacted Elejalde and told him that he wanted him to, basically, reprise his character from that movie; Elejalde told him that was his favorite role, so he was glad to act in Timecrimes.

Timecrimes deserves to be seen as widely as possible, so here’s hoping that it’s picked for distribution soon.

Sadly, Chris Graham’s The Ferryman ultimately proved to be another disappointment for me. It has several elements in place for a rip-roaring adventure in horror: three couples sailing to Fiji answer a distress call only to be caught up a huge fogbank. They pick up a stranded man who brings division, destruction and death to the small boat.

John Rhys-Davis plays the abandoned boat skipper with a fair degree of bluster, and the other performances are generally OK, but something is missing. As soon as Rhys-Davis boards the ship we know where things are going, which might be fine, but none of the characters engender much sympathy, so when they turn on each other it’s hard to care too much.

Perhaps if The Ferryman had more edge or intensity, its faults could be minimized; great action scenes can distract from a weak dramatic structure and prove to be fulfilling on their own merits. Really, the film needed to be either more brutal or more inventive with its narrative. As it stands now, it’s hard to recommend.

But it’s a festival, and it’s Fantastic Fest, so I’m looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings.