09/03/2024 - British black comedy specialist Alice Lowe returns with a look at love through the ages, and among the ruins

Aneurin Barnard and Alice Lowe in Timestalkers (© Ludovic Robert)

The story of Alice Lowe’s Timestalker spans millennia, from the literal dawn of time to the year 2117. After the British director’s success with her Venice-premiering Prevenge [+see also:
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film profile] in 2016, the wait for her second effort has felt nearly as long. Her debut perfectly blended grisly horror and comic understatement, in its tale of an expecting mother driven to murder at the command of her unborn baby. Timestalker is far more ambitious in its script and conception — besotted as much with the baroque 1780s as the flashy 1980s — yet there is something faintly unsatisfying and almost quaint about it. The film premieres this week in the Narrative Spotlight section at SXSW, in Austin, Texas. 

To gently yet somewhat glibly introduce this epoch-spanning tale, you could say it narratively and tonally merges last year’s The Beast with the high-concept comedy Bedazzled (starring Peter Cook originally, then Brendan Fraser in its Hollywood remake). Lowe — a triple-threat as writer, director and lead — is Agnes, who yearns for and pursues the dashing, Byronic Alex (Aneurin Barnard) across several time periods and Anglophone settings. The sections set in 1793, where Agnes is a bored aristocrat and Alex a dopey highwayman; and in 1980, where the former is an obsessive fan of the latter’s New Romantic pop pin-up, are given the largest narrative segments, whilst the film also darts in and out in a pleasingly non-linear fashion across early modern times, WW2, and a post-apocalyptic dystopia. 

Lowe has spoken of her dissatisfaction with the “strong female character” trope she’s often had to incarnate. Provocatively, Agnes has a motivation better associated with male characters in film history, that of the dashed and frustrated suitor whose amorous feelings are denied reciprocation and catharsis. But Timestalker’s arguable key flaw is that its script just isn’t funny enough. Compared to her last movie, and its spiritual predecessor Sightseers [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ben Wheatley
film profile] (which she also wrote and starred in), it is visually busier, more fluent, and more accomplished, yet the laughs we’re hoping to enjoy - be they light chuckles or roars — simply aren’t present. In connection to this, the film also recalls a rather old-fashioned kind of comedy, nurtured by the British sketch stagecraft tradition that gave us Monty Python, where complex historical eras can be presented irreverently and maybe stereotypically; wearing a wig and face powder, or a Victorian bonnet, Lowe often undercuts this pageantry with an anachronistic f-bomb or jaded side-eye expression. Despite the film’s focus on complex gender politics and the unstable rules of attraction, the sense of edge and provocation that defined Lowe’s prior work is nevertheless absent. 

Yet Timestalker undeniably works fluidly and impressively as a piece of storytelling, easily holding the audience’s attention: forcing us to lean in to connect indirect set-ups with belated pay-offs, and peppering telling visual clues amidst the montage and match cuts. The film works so well as a recursive tale of amour fou, that first audiences might also expect it to be satisfying as a more generic comedy. Beyond his seductive dark eyes and tousled fringe, what actual fervour Alex generates for Agnes is too opaque, and a matter of received wisdom rather than felt reality for viewers; but Lowe’s adeptness with a gripping yarn, expressed with finesse, is beyond doubt.  

Timestalker is a UK production, staged by Western Edge Pictures and Popcorn Group. Worldwide sales are by HanWay Films.