Alice Lowe’s second shot in the director’s chair is a brilliantly imaginative rom-com-thriller. Here’s our Timestalker review.
Agnes (Alice Lowe) has a lot of problems, and most of them are the same man. After falling in love with a dashing young heretic (Aneurin Barnard) in 1688 and getting a halberd in the head for her trouble, you’d think she’d have learnt her lesson.
But when another Agnes – a wig-toting aristocrat in 1793 – has her carriage held up by a familiar looking highwayman, she falls head over heels once more. She does the same as a Victorian schoolteacher in 1847, a popstar’s superfan in 1980, and a dystopian scavenger in the distant future.
It’s a killer premise, and an ambitious one. Eight years on from her brilliantly twisted directorial debut, Prevenge, Lowe proves that film’s brand of high-concept genre cinema goodness wasn’t a one off. When it works, Timestalker really, really works – dazzlingly inventive, whip-smart and built as a labour of love to everything from the video nasty era to our very British obsession of dressing up in clearly identifiable period costumes.
Shot for a large part with a deliberately hallucinogenic fisheye lens, there’s an oddness to Lowe’s historical playground that belies its often-hilarious script. There’s a real joy, too, in the liberal application of extra-gloopy blood spurts, decapitations and the werewolf-style howl when Nick Frost’s doggish husband bashes his way into a room.
But there’s an oddness to the film’s structure that feels less intentional. Moving more or less chronologically (sans a few second-length flashbacks), there’s a sense that the film is moving in a straight line when the story would rather be doing more of a jig. The different lengths of time spent in each period prove distracting, too, with roughly half the 90-minute runtime spent in the entertainingly realised – but inherently more mundane – 1980s, leading to an ending that leaves a few too many questions about Agnes’ condition unanswered.
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Still, the shear breadth and depth of imagination on display is impossible to take against. Though the film’s criminally small budget (why financiers weren’t eating out of Lowe’s hand for this one is a mystery) shines through in some notably empty scenes, the quality of the script and brilliantly sketch-comedy-esque performances from Lowe and the rest of the cast are difficult lights to hide. Brimming with life, joy and a typically British sense of historical melancholy (with the odd decapitation thrown in for good measure), this is the British indie comedy you’ve been waiting for. Let’s hope the money doesn’t take eight years to arrive for the next one.
Timestalker is in UK cinemas now.