Alice Lowe knows how to do high concept. In her 2016 feature, Prevenge, she played a heavily pregnant serial killer taking direction from her unborn baby on who – and how – to murder. In Timestalker, she’s a lovelorn woman whose romantic obsession transcends time and space itself.
Once again, Lowe is doing triple duty: writer, director and star. She’s Agnes, a peasant woman in 1600s Scotland, a noble-lady in 1790s England, and a New Romantic groupie in 1980s Manhattan. Plus maybe even Cleopatra, or someone vaguely resembling Cleopatra, because which woman hasn’t been Cleopatra in a previous life? (I definitely have.) All timelines lead Agnes to a handsome stranger (Dunkirk’s Aneurin Barnard) and, inevitably, her doom.
Barnard, for his part, is her object of affection and obsession, occupying the largely personality-less role usually reserved for women in these types of sci-fi romps. In chronological order, he is a rebel priest, a robber, and a feckless ’80s pop star, all roles that give the Welsh actor room to indulge in goofery with a bit of edge.
Timestalker creates a time-hopping menagerie of madness
The supporting cast boasts national treasure Nick Frost, playing the sadistic husband who’s as obsessed with possessing Agnes as she is with the green-eyed ‘love of her lives’, Interview with the Vampire’s Jacob Anderson as a slimy Svengali, and Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds as Agnes’s long-suffering handmaiden. Their roles rarely change through their lives, past, present and future. They’re all, love object included, mere footnotes in her histories.
Through some ingenious production design and costuming, Timestalker creates a time-hopping menagerie of madness, with Lowe centre stage and always game. Visually, she commits to a colour, and weaves that into every scene through details small and large. In Prevenge, it was a brilliant, blood red; in Timestalker, it’s bubblegum pink and purple. This visual lightness of touch is a signature of hers, as her character gets killed over and over again, all to get closer to a man who won’t even cross the road when she gets run over by a carriage.
The Sightseers star is a master of obsession, which is the connective tissue of her two directorial efforts. And I’m obsessed with what she’s going to make next.
In UK cinemas Oct 11.