Timestalk­er review – rip­ples with insight and emotion

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.

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

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