Wri/Dir: Alice Lowe | Cast: Alice Lowe, Jacob Anderson, Nick Frost, Tanya Reynolds, Aneurin Barnard | UK Drama 90′
A love-affair pursued throughout the ages via a succession of incarnations would be a great basis for a sci-fi/fantasy romance. But an infatuated, somewhat annoying woman pursuing a baffled and apathetic man over the centuries offers a tragicomic scenario – which could, in theory, yield a decent mix of humour and pathos.
However, Timestalker ultimately looks better on paper than it comes off in execution.
Early sequences give us Agnes (played by Alice Lowe, who also wrote and directed the film) as a seventeenth-century Scottish villager smitten by Aneurin Barnard’s masked cultist, an eighteenth century English aristocrat in love with a highwayman played by the same actor, and a nineteenth century schoolteacher who… well, maybe it’s best to draw a veil over what happens to her.
These sequences are built from scenes so short that they feel more like TV sketches than elements of a feature film, and while Lowe’s poker-faced comic style can be effective, she doesn’t have the actorly chops to pull off a range of period characterisations, even ones which are too truncated to be much more than gestures towards portrayals.
The film only hits its stride when Agnes finds herself in the 1980s. The pace slows, the characters get a bit more fleshed-out, and Lowe seems more at home with the vein of comic targets offered by the era: aerobics dance classes, New Romantic music, risible fashions and hairdos, female bedrooms decorated with Pierrots, etc.
In this time-period her fixation takes the form of Alex, a Bolan-esque, Adam Ant-ish pop star who speaks with a high-pitched estuary accent and whose music is an amusingly accurate parody of 80s synth-pop. When Agnes confronts him in his dressing-room she’s wearing a convincing ‘dandy highwayman’ outfit, made all the more hilarious by the fact that in the 80s, people actually did go out to gigs and nightclubs dressed like this.
As they talk, Alex off-handedly suggests that Agnes isn’t really a time-traveller, but a psychotic fan lost in a fantasy world. Which raises the question: were her previous ‘incarnations’ just make-believe, and have we somehow been unwittingly inhabiting her fantasies? It’s an interesting, slightly head-swirling moment, but it doesn’t get fully developed.
All the ‘Alex’ characters seem to lack any awareness of, or interest in Agnes, which makes her intense attraction to him feel ludicrous – but also difficult to warm to, with the result that the film never really catches fire. It’s a shame, because the idea has potential and Lowe is supported by a talented cast including Nick Frost as an appalling, bison-like husband and Tanya Reynolds as a willowy friend and ally.
There are things to enjoy in Timestalker, but it doesn’t fully deliver in terms of humour, it isn’t at all moving, and the time travel element isn’t thought through cleverly enough. Perhaps Lowe’s go-to mode of comic bathos doesn’t really suit the material, or maybe her talent has just been overstretched by the effort to write, direct and perform the starring role. If so, she’d be better served by delegating at least one of these functions in future productions. @IanLong
Ian Long is a writer, screenwriting teacher and story consultant at www.ianlong.org
IN UK and IRISH CINEMAS from 11 October 2024