Review: Timestalker

Director:  Alice Lowe

Stars:  Alice Lowe, Tanya Reynolds, Jacob Anderson

Its been a long (too long!) eight years since Alice Lowe’s deliciously macabre feature directorial effort Prevenge – a darkly comic tale of an expectant mother on a murderous tour dictated by her unborn baby (that Lowe filmed while heavily pregnant) – and the UK’s independent cinema has felt her absence. Lowe has a particular, peculiar sensibility that is inherently British. Both delectably dry and appreciably silly. But now, at last, she is back! And if Prevenge was a film typified by the need for under-the-gun haste, Timestalker feels at every turn like a labor of love conceptualised over years.

Meet Agnes (Lowe). Or, more precisely, meet Agneses. Divided into multiple chapters set over as many centuries, we’re asked to follow Lowe’s hapless heroine through various reincarnations ranging from the 17th century through to… now that would be telling. In each instance and irrespective of her position in society, Agnes is taken, head over heels, by the mysterious and elusive Alex (Aneurin Barnard). It is a love so blindingly powerful that it stays with her through lifetimes. She always remembers him. Even deigns him a Him, so great is her devotion. Yet he remains at best ambivalent of her declarations across the ages.

So we chart a love that is snarled up in the idea of love. The ‘stalker’ of the title isn’t a joke. See Agnes’ 1980 shrine to Alex’s new-romantic persona of that particular era. See her efforts to keep tabs on him, just as fellow wretch George (Nick Frost) does his damnedest to keep hold of Agnes (much to her own chagrin). Timestalker presents us the foibles and follies of a crush, writ large across history, making grand, unending and exhausting something that can’t sustain itself. Agnes rarely gets an opportunity to know Alex, but her mind is made up. The precise tragedy of any crush and, in the aftermath, the particular sting of its embarrassment.

Timestalker is lovingly crafted. One senses Lowe has had the time to put the work in after the deadline-baiting blitz of Prevenge. It’s there in the relished motifs (wheels and caged birds evocative of cycles and prisons) and the deliberately calibrated, recurring colour palette (the film is a veritable rainbow of pinks, from ‘flamingo’ to ‘fuchsia’). The dialogue is a tennis match across the ages, batting reference points back and forth, while the recurrence of several characters in the orbit of Agnes is redolent of a far more romantic notion of soul mates in a more collective, communal sense.

Lowe leads, of course, but at her sides are the film’s secret weapons; Tanya Reynolds and Jacob Anderson as Meg and Scipio respectively. We linger a while in Agnes’ 18th century iteration where Meg and Scipio take the roles of servants – staff – to her. This weights their dynamic awkwardly (though any sense of power is undermined comedically by Lowe). Their roles are more harmonious in the film’s other long section – our aforementioned detour to 1980 – where the two frame Agnes more classically like Shakespearian angels. Agnes is another of Lowe’s wonderful idiots, late to realisations self-evident to us in the audience. The frequent ingenuity and visual sparkle of Timestalker more than allows us the time to feel entertained while we wait for her to discover her own self-worth.

It isn’t always an easy ride. There are jokes that don’t land particularly well (one especially, which may be truthful to its time period, but which thuds like a stone in 2024), and along with this a vague sense of air in the picture as though allowing for belly-laughs that haven’t quite happened. But that’s the nature – and danger – of comedy. Its some of the hardest alchemy and, even more than horror, acutely dependant on individual tastes. There’s also a nagging sense that this is a budgetarily curtailed version of an even greater vision. A brighter bird, caged. And a sense of missed opportunities to play more boldly in the paddling pools of gender and sexuality.

Still, there’s no use bemoaning what isn’t here. Looking at what is, this is still a remarkable vision on limited means. And, from a creative perspective, a fuller indication of Lowe’s ambition and visual imagination. When so much of British cinema is content – eager even – to sit squarely in traditional little boxes in service of a pre-set (and comatose) audience, films like Timestalker or Luna Carmoon’s Hoard feel like essential jolts to the system.

Let’s hope it doesn’t mean another eight years for whatever’s next. These gaps can feel like lifetimes.