CRONOS is an ingenious Mobius strip of a movie. My only complaint is that the filmmakers used the same title as Guillermo Del Toro’s directorial debut. This title is taken; why not pick another one?

The film has to be seen at least twice to be fully appreciated. There are two elements in the beautiful opening shot – a little girl’s teddy bear and the cloud of smoke from which she emerges – that don’t make complete sense until the final scene. The film’s director, Juan Pennisi, manages to pack a lot of events and information into a very brief running time.

In a courtyard, a little girl turns over an hourglass and says, “Wake up, please.” A young man wakes up and observes the sand falling inside the hourglass. He tries two different times to get into a house with a big ring of keys (I love those keys; this movie obviously had an excellent prop master). Once he’s inside the house, there are a series of clever trick shots in which the young man appears to exit from one side of a room and enter from the other in a single take. Before the big reveal that ends the movie, the young man confronts a double of himself, in a special-effects shot that’s as seamless as anything in Duncan Jones’s MOON.

Pennisi appears to have been inspired by David Lynch, particularly his trippy LOST HIGHWAY. In both films, characters seem to walk directly through the camera in back-to-back shots. And the hero of each film enters a kind of vortex and emerges on the other side to confront his doppelganger. CRONOS is a vividly shot mystery; it’s clear that a lot of care and thought went into the images we see.