Timestalker

The Plot: It’s 1688 and Agnes (Alice Lowe) is drifting through life… until one day she encounters Alex (Aneurin Barnard) who is about to lose his head. She is instantly smitten, but is unable to make the connection required to him. She will encounter him again through five other time periods over the next few centuries. In the vain hope of finding true love, she tries once again to convince him that they’re meant for each other. The path to true love though is paved with thorns and some occasional fatal accidents…

The Verdict: Alice Lowe broke onto the filmmaking scene in Ben Wheatley’s distinctive films Kill List and Sightseers. She has since been a consistently busy actor working on several projects a year, though is not necessarily a household name. In 2016, she made an impressionable directorial debut with the horror comedy Prevenge – a witty reflection of her own, possibly monstrous, pregnancy at the time of filming. Being a triple threat – actor, writer and director – it was only a matter of time before she would return to the director’s chair and offer up another warped vision of the world filtered through her singular mind. That film is Timestalker, an often bittersweet, time-jumping romp through centuries of history which paints Lowe as either a hopeless romantic, a scoffing cynic or a bit of both for good measure. Love is eternal as the saying goes, but it’s often just out of reach or unfulfilled whatever the time period.

That seems to be the impression that Timestalker evokes. Lowe said that she wanted to write something that reflected the eternal humiliation that is the search for love. So, she created the character of Agnes as she obsessively pursues one man over 429 years through six different time periods – 1688, 1793, 1847, 1940, 1980 and 2117. Give or take a few character decapitations in between. If that’s meant to sound (severed) head-scratching, then that’s intentional. Lowe has structured her film in an unconventional way, flitting through these time periods to portray the apparent futility of love when it always ends anyway. The time periods in Lowe’s script have been specifically chosen to capture the kind of high-concept, supernatural atmosphere from the films she grew up with – from Witchfinder General to Groundhog Day and beyond. That’s certainly evident in the way she approaches character development, suggesting that Agnes learns more about herself and her needs with each time period in much the same way as Phil does with each repeating day in Groundhog Day.

The script is somewhat scattershot as a result, occasionally throwing random thoughts at the screen. Some parts of it work (the bird in the cage metaphor) while other parts (Alex as a louche rock star) don’t tie in with interpretations elsewhere in the film. Some time periods barely get a look-in (hello and goodbye, Victorian era), while others get a more expanded timeframe that reflect Lowe’s preference (the 1980s gets the most coverage). Had this been made for TV, it might have worked more convincingly as a six-part, half-hour comedy series a la Blackadder. As a film that flashes by in 90 minutes, it’s amusing and frustrating in equal measure. There’s undeniable fun to be had watching the same actors change costumes, make-up and accents like a theatrical troupe having a field day. It also comes across as more than a bit artificial though. What looks like Cardiff unconvincingly stands-in for 1980s New York with a yellow cab and a hot dog stand done up by the props department. Maybe the artificiality of it all is the point – that time is a reflection of Agnes’ delusional state of mind.

Timestalker is an intriguing enough proposition from a talented actor/writer/director with lots of ideas bursting out of her colourful mind. Lowe namechecks Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as an influence. Like Gilliam though, her imagination often exceeds her reach and the end result is that Timestalker just about holds itself together – with bits of tape, a few bent nails and a lot of admiration for Agnes’ and her search for love. It’s an oddball curio that might have future cult film written all over it. There’s certainly nothing else quite like it in cinemas at the moment.

Rating: 3 / 5

Review by Gareth O’Connor