Time-travel movies are often difficult enough to wrap your mind around when characters are leaping through major calendar continuums, a la Marty McFly. But restrict the activity to, say, a couple of hours, as is the case in writer-director Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes, and the gimmick inevitably defies logic as well as physics. This Spanish thriller begins eerily enough, with a suburban middle-aged man named Héctor (Karra Elejalde) relaxing in his backyard when he spots an apparently distressed young woman undressing in the distant woods. (Yeah, he’s got binoculars, but let’s ignore that and side with him anyway.) Taking the crime-film bait, Héctor investigates, which results in him getting stabbed by an assailant whose head is wrapped in bloodied bandages. He then runs to the nearest lodging, which you’d think would be his own house but is actually a super-secret lab harboring a time machine. Looping ensues. Timecrimes requires viewers to be forgiving, particularly of characters making stupid choices and, more naggingly, of the question of what exactly was going on just before Héctor got involved. But if you prevent yourself from thinking outside the film’s otherwise well-written and -acted box, there’s enough intrigue and excitement here to keep you from wishing you could go back and spend these 88 minutes at some other movie.