Institute History
Description
As it happens, this smart, feisty thriller begins quite sedately. Hector sits on a lawn chair outside his country home surveying the nearby hillside through a pair of binoculars. But, catching sight of what appears to be a nude woman amidst the trees, he hikes up to investigate. When he’s attacked by a sinister figure wrapped in a grotesque, pink head bandage, Hector takes refuge in a laboratory atop the hill. He tries to elude the stalker by hiding in a peculiar scientific contraption, and moments later, he emerges—only to find that it’s hours earlier. But time has a lot in store for Hector.
Nacho Vigalondo, who directed the ingenious, Oscar-nominated short 7:35 in the Morning, has a great instinct for the aesthetic, moving effortlessly between a tense, disquieting atmosphere and a relentless, driving energy. But drawing from a tradition of more cerebral science fiction, his story of an ordinary man flung into circumstances far beyond his comprehension (and perhaps his control) is propelled by a deeper curiosity than genre antics alone will satisfy. Ever more desperate to decipher the web of cause and effect surrounding him, Hector becomes increasingly complicit in the very situation he’s trying to escape. Any physicist would tell him that the more you try to fix things, the more they fall apart. When you mess with time, you mess with nature.