Timestalker review – digging deep into how love makes fools of us all

There is something highly seductive about the idea that we all have a soulmate. The problem is that there could be a million obstacles standing between you and your beloved. Maybe they live on another continent, or work on a nuclear submarine or are already married to an atypically moral billionaire. 

To invest everything in the hope that there is one true love for you out there is to risk stepping on a cosmic banana peel. 

Timestalker – the eccentric new film from writer, director and star Alice Lowe – embraces the possibilities of that banana peel, finding the farce in dreamy, high-minded romance. As the title suggests, it also turbocharges the idea by adding some Doctor Who time-travel energy. Imagine two eternal souls, destined to be entwined, reincarnating through history and struggling against social conventions to try and be together. 

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It is a big swing for Lowe, who previously co-wrote and starred in the caravanning serial killers comedy Sightseers (2012) before making her directorial debut with Prevenge (2016), a wild slasher about an expectant mum seemingly compelled by her unborn child to violently avenge her husband’s death. (Lowe, who also wrote and starred, made the film in the latter stages of her own pregnancy.) 

After those contemporary satires, Timestalker expands Lowe’s creative canvas by hitching its oxcart to the sort of thing that the UK film and TV industry has successfully exported to the rest of the world for decades: lavish costume dramas set in a world of lavish gowns and prickly social etiquette. 

While there are constrained corsets and flamboyant wigs to come, the film opens in hardscrabble 17th century rural Scotland. When we first meet Agnes (Lowe), she is a literal spinster working hard at her wheel alongside fellow peasant Meg (Tanya Reynolds from Sex Education).  

In the fine tradition of Witchfinder General, a heretic preacher is set to be executed, so Agnes and Meg hustle down to the village square. The preacher is unmasked and revealed to be the dim-but-dishy Alex (Aneurin Barnard). Agnes believes she has belatedly met her true love, just as he is about to be decapitated. So their potential union is cut tragically short, albeit in rather unexpected fashion. 

That vignette sets a recurring template for the rest of the film. To put it in Swiftie terms, this is Lowe’s Eras Tour: Agnes and Alex reincarnate every century or so, from the drawing rooms of 18th-century England to the scuzzy music venues of 1980s New York. 

The same supporting cast recurs in each setting, with the excellent Reynolds as Agnes’s frustrated gal pal across the ages, Jacob Anderson as a wryly observant servant and Nick Frost as a gluttonous, misogynistic mongrel. 

But every attempt by Agnes to grab hold of true love ends gruesomely. If cosmic forces are indeed at play, they seem to have a thing for decapitation. 

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From Horrible Histories (which has featured Lowe as a guest star) to Blackadder, we are fairly familiar with these subversive UK takes on period drama, although Timestalker is shot with a gauzy, blooming quality that adds a sheen of unreality to everything. The stylised retro look is not a million miles away from another faux-period piece Lowe was previously brilliant in: Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Appropriately, it feels like the whole film could be a dream sequence. 

While the tone is blackly comic – from jokes about vintage sex toys to real-life assassinations – what Timestalker really makes time and space for is digging deep into Agnes and her lovesick pathology. Lowe delivers a marvellously knotty lead performance, a volatile mix of desperate romantic gestures and horrifying self-delusion. She also looks great in an oversized wig. 

There may be the faintest echo of Edge of Tomorrow, in which Tom Cruise’s time-looped sci-fi soldier would accrue just a little bit more useful strategic knowledge about how to achieve his mission before being brutally killed and sent back to square one. But if Timestalker is a puzzle box to be solved, it does not serve up any easy answers.  

As the time jumps get closer to the present and then overshoot into the unknown, it is left to the viewer to interpret whether what they think Agnes has gleaned from the experience. With its unorthodox visual look and doggedly offbeat sensibility, Timestalker will certainly not resonate with everyone. Only one thing seems certain: love makes fools of us all.  

Timestalker is in cinemas from 11 October. 

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