Director/Screenplay – Alice Lowe, Producers – Mark Hopkins, Vaughan Sivell, Nathan Stoessel & Tom Wood, Photography – Ryan Eddleston, Music – Toydrum, Visual Effects Supervisor – Markus Lundqvist, Visual Effects – Black Kite Studios (Supervisor – Dan Sanders), Coffee & TV, Daydreamer, Hotspring, Selected Works, The Electric Theatre Collective Supervisors – Alex Gabucci & Amy Smith) & The Mill, Special Effects – Real SFX, Makeup/Prosthetics Designer – Nik Buck, Production Design – Felicity Hickson. Production Company – BFI/Ffilm Cymru Wales/Head Gear Films/Metrol Technology/Creative Wales/Hanway Films/Popcorn Group/Western Edge Pictures.
Cast
Alice Lowe (Agnes), Aneurin Barnard (Alex MacBeath), Jacob Anderson (Scipio), Nick Frost (George), Tanya Reynolds (Meg), Kate Dickie (Marion), Zach Wyatt (Tarot Reader/Quack Doctor)
Plot
In Edinburgh of 1658, Agnes joins the crowds as Alex MacBeath is to be burned at the stake, accused of witchcraft. The moment she sees Alex, Agnes is infatuated and wants to know if she will see him in another life. Just then she accidentally gets a pike impaled in her forehead, which becomes the opportunity for Alex to make an escape. In 1793, Agnes is married to the uncouth Lord George but becomes infatuated after encountering Alex as a highwayman. They meet again in 1847 and 1940, before Agnes is incarnated in 1980 and encounters Alex again as the successful rock star Alex Phoenix. There she is given cause to question why she is pursuing him throughout time.
Alice Lowe is an actress who has been working in British tv primarily since the early 2000s. She was a regular on Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place (2004) and Horrible Histories (2009-14) and has made guest appearances in numerous other shows. She has appeared in assorted comedy and dramatic roles in films such as Hot Fuzz (2007), The Ghoul (2016), Dark Encounter (2019), Eternal Beauty (2019) and especially Ben Wheatley’s murderous dark comedy Sightseers (2012), where she was the lead and also wrote the screenplay. I had quite a liking for Lowe’s directorial debut Prevenge (2016), a film she directed, wrote and starred in when she was pregnant, while casting herself as a murderous pregnant woman. Timestalker was her second film as director.
When it came to Timestalker, the film I was immediately reminded of was Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), which similarly had a love affair conducted across various eras of British history – reincarnation here, an immortal in that story. Both films also have an incredibly playful attitude towards history and serve up the pageant of costumery with comically exaggerated effect. Lowe throws in wildly over-the-top touches – when blood is spilled it comes out crimson, costumes are extravagant affairs like Lowe’s giant pink heart-shaped front wig. The film comes in colour schemes of mostly blue and pink pastels, while heart-shaped motifs run throughout and a canary in a heart-shaped cage keeps turning up in each era. Lowe treats all of this with an undeniably droll sense of humour. She is constantly deflating her character and those around her.
Agnes (Alice Lowe, also the film’s director and writer) is held up by the reincarnated Alex (Aneurin Barnard) as a highwayman
There comes the sudden point where the entire film spins around its tracks when we reach the 1980s [PLOT SPOILERS[] as Alice Lowe’s Agnes comes to the realisation that her cross-time pursuit of Aneurin Barnard is actually a case of unrequited love and he is in fact fleeing from her and that she is in fact a stalker – the timestalker of the film’s title. This makes for a fascinating Conceptual Reversal Twist, followed by a group therapy scene where people appear to be helping Alice to realise that she had imagined all the previous eras.
However, Timestalker then abandons that track and continues on as it was before, jumping ahead to the year 2117 where Alice is a protester and Aneurin is part of a police riot squad sent in to bust them. Their eyes meet and the film fades out with the implications that this time things will be requited. This suggestion it was all in her mind and then the flip-flop back to it being real after all only confuses what has up until that point been a fairly enjoyable film. If anything, it seems maybe an ending born of not knowing how to resolve the story.
