Timestalker Review

If Prevenge taught us nothing else, it’s that when Alice Lowe writes and directs a film, it’s probably going to be pretty weird. Timestalker might not be quite as out-there as the film about a woman’s unborn child telling her to murder people, but it’s refreshingly unusual nonetheless, a time-travelling anti-romcom about a woman going to alarming lengths to win over her unrequited love. The clue was in the title all along.

The titular timestalker is Agnes (Lowe), whom we first meet in 1600s Scotland as she falls in love-at-first-sight with a heretic preacher (Aneurin Barnard) immediately before his execution. Her declaration of love buys him time to get away… and also results in her getting killed instead. As she and her beau repeatedly reincarnate across history, this pattern plays itself out over and over, with Agnes’s would-be lover never interested and Agnes always getting killed in some gruesome way.

Considering how many time periods Lowe aims to cover in the film’s brief 90-minute runtime, there was a worry that she would be spreading herself too thin and not giving the individual stories enough room to breathe. Luckily, that proves not to be the case, since we see many of Agnes’s reincarnations only very briefly, some of them for a mere few seconds. By really focusing on two periods – the 1790s and 1980s, in both of which Agnes also has to contend with a violent, brutish oaf called George (Nick Frost) – Lowe gives the story the space it needs while allowing lots of Agnes’s deaths to play out as quick gags. One of the snippets sees her get violently killed moments after reuniting with her “beloved”, and it’s disturbing and hilarious in equal measure.

And that sums up the film as a whole pretty well, actually. Unsurprisingly for a film by Alice Lowe, it’s a hoot all the way through, with silly pratfalls and extended gags that she stretches out just long enough to have their full effect without overstaying their welcome. But set across from the laughs is the ever-growing awareness that Agnes really is just stalking the man she supposedly loves, pursuing him from life to life regardless of his lack of interest. The ’80s segment toys with the idea that she might actually just be mad, and all this past-lives business is just in her head.

Lowe gives a perfectly-pitched performance to match this uneasy, queasy tone, simultaneously sympathetic because of her fated violent deaths and genuinely unsettling in her obsession. Lowe isn’t afraid to make Agnes imperfect and unlikeable when necessary either, particularly through her obliviousness to the one person in all these lives who actually does love her back. The whole film depends on this delicate balancing act, and Lowe pulls it off with aplomb. Even George gets his moments of ambiguity and sympathy despite mostly being a male chauvinist pig, and Nick Frost gets the best chance he’s had to show off his range since Fighting With My Family.

Timestalker is a film that could so easily have gone badly wrong, misjudging the tone or spending too much time on the high-concept premise for the characters to work, but Alice Lowe makes it look easy. It’s a rare film that leaves you wishing it had actually been a little longer because it would have been nice to spend more time in Agnes’s worlds, but there’s nothing wrong with a brisk, perfectly paced 90 minutes that leaves you wanting more. Whatever Lowe’s next project is, it can’t come soon enough.