Timestalk­er – first-look review

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 feel 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 and cre­ative merits.

Lowe plays Agnes, intro­duced as a sad­sack spin­ster dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages, locked in a far­away stu­por while sit­ting at a spin­ning wheel. As a lit­tle dog runs off 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 back­fire in the most spec­tac­u­lar way imaginable.

This is a film where the less you know, the more fun you’ll have tum­bling down the mul­ti-tiered 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 (trag­ic for the char­ac­ter rather than the view­er, that is).

On hand is Nick Frost whose char­ac­ter is vio­lent and flawed, but not with­out his empa­thet­ic pres­sure points. Jacob Ander­son, too, is bril­liant as the grin­ning Cheshire Cat to Agnes’s Alice, offer­ing cryp­tic assis­tance along the road 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 even Ste­vie Nicks demure.

The title of the film, Timestalk­er, may seem like a bit of 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 is in fact the per­fect encap­su­la­tion of Lowe’s com­plex and pur­pose­ful­ly incon­clu­sive intentions.

It’s a very fun­ny film, and Lowe is some­one who can elic­it a laugh from the dead­pan line read­ing of a sin­gle word, yet the impres­sion that it leaves is quite dif­fer­ent: a con­fes­sion­al and bit­ter­sweet howl into the void; an expres­sion of con­fu­sion and dis­ap­point­ment; a film which refus­es to explain its heroine’s lit­er­al gen­er­a­tional trau­ma with sim­plis­tic self-help plat­i­tudes. It’s des­per­ate­ly mov­ing in the most sat­is­fy­ing­ly insid­i­ous way, even­tu­al­ly recall­ing no less than Sal­ly Potter’s ethe­re­al, time-hop­ping Orlan­do. But to restate: it’s also very funny.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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