Alice Lowe’s miraculous second feature is a triumph of imagination, soul-searching and a refined comic instinct.
It’s hard to watch a film like Timestalker and not think that someone, somewhere, preferably a culturally enlightened fop or dowager, should throw wadded bundles of banknotes at writer/director plus actor, Alice Lowe, so she can make whatever the hell she wants. Her 2016 film, Prevenge, about an expectant mother whose unborn child exerts a malevolent force over her, is a rich and deep film about the unspoken psychological torments that come with pregnancy.
With Timestalker, she doubles down on the scope, ambition and insight of that debut to deliver a melancholy romantic fable which spans multiple centuries and can aptly be described as Alain Resnais does Blackadder. The expansive nature of her cinematic dreams feels as if they would be perfectly served by more budget and resource, but that’s not to say that the film she’s made doesn’t deliver on its own industrious merits.
Lowe plays Agnes, introduced as a sad-sack spinster during the Middle Ages, locked in a faraway stupor while sitting at a spinning wheel. As a little dog runs of with her ball of yarn, she pricks her finger which catalyses a fairy tale odyssey of violently unrequited love. She becomes instantly besotted with a dashing rebel priest (Aneurin Barnard) who is captured and primed for comically gruesome public torture. Yet Agnes is sadly unable to fulfil what she construes as her destiny, and her attempts to forge a connection with this mystery man backfires spectacularly.
This is a film where the less you know, the more fun you’ll have tumbling down the pink, furry rabbit hole that Lowe has painstakingly constructed. But let’s just say the film definitely takes us to some wild places (and times), as we see intriguing and eccentric variations of this initial sketch play out, some of which are more lavish with the detail and the size of the cast, and others which are tragically curt for poor old Agnes.
On hand is Nick Frost whose slathering mutt-of-a-character channels Michael Gambon in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Jacob Anderson, too, is brilliant as the grinning Cheshire Cat to Agnes’s Alice, ofering cryptic assistance that is roundly ignored by our smitten damsel. Formally, Lowe and her team do a lot with a little, generating atmosphere through clever, expressive production design, New Romantic vibes and some soft-focus dreamy bits of business with floaty chiffon that would make Kate Bush demure.
The title Timestalker, is a a red herring in that it makes it sound like a time-travelling action-thriller from the 1980s, but, by its closing passages, it becomes clear that it offers the perfect encapsulation of Lowe’s psychologically complex and purposefully inconclusive intentions.
As a writer, Lowe is someone who can elicit a laugh from the deadpan line reading of a single word, yet the impression that the film leaves is quite different: a confessional, self-lacerating howl into the void; an expression of confusion and disappointment; a film which refuses to explain its heroine’s literal generational trauma with self-help platitudes. It’s moving in the most insidious way, eventually recalling no less than Sally Potter’s ethereal, time-hopping Orlando. But also very funny.
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