Timestalker (2024)

Alice Lowe’s Timestalker initially grabbed my attention with its promising premise—especially since I had really enjoyed her previous film, Prevenge. The quirky and darkly comic style Lowe brought to that project had me expecting another sharp, unique movie here. Unfortunately, despite its inventive concept, Timestalker ran out of steam much earlier than I hoped.

The idea of a time-travelling love obsession spanning centuries should offer a lot of comedic material. Still, the film quickly exhausts its best jokes, leaving a narrative that lacks momentum. While there are some fun moments early on, and Lowe’s distinctive style is clear, the pacing feels uneven, and much of the humour doesn’t sustain itself throughout the film. I wanted to love this as much as Prevenge, but Timestalker didn’t quite deliver on its potential.

Alice Lowe did virtually everything in this quirky drama about the immortal "Agnes" who travels through time desperate to reunite with an highwayman (Aneurin Bernard) who robbed her sometime in the 17th century. Snag is - every time she manages to engineer a scenario when they can be together, she ends up dead! We reset, and moving steadily through time we encounter her in different guises and him likewise evolving, ultimately into a jaded rock star. Along the way, she is guided by the omnipresent "Scipio" (Jacob Anderson) who plays a role similar to one of Shakespeare's fools, by her maid/best pal "Meg" (Tanya Reynolds) and slightly bonkers husband (Nick Frost) as loads of daft adventures ensue. It's a sort of hybrid of Peter Greenaway meets Terry Gilliam this, with shades of "Monty Python" as the humour has a slapstick goriness to it that starts off quite funny but all too quickly runs out of steam. Indeed, this really is the problem with this, It's more of a short story that's been drawn out to fill ninety minutes. Once the point has been made and the joke established, it seems content just to shift the timeline and then tell us a similar story all over again. I did like the premiss, and there's no doubt that Lowe does have some good comedy timing at the start as her hate-hate rapport with her rakish husband is demonstrated, but Bernard was always more about his smile than his skill and sadly the whole thing just faded away. Zach Wyatt is quite entertaining as the dubious tarot reader but in the end it's too close to a rather weak farce for me.