Entertainment
The gloriously gory comedy for Monty Python followers
Timestalker will not be your common time journey movie. Neglect classics like The Terminator or About Time, as a result of director and author Alice Lowe breaks all the foundations. Starring as its lead, Agnes, Lowe performs a lady destined to chase the unenthusiastic object of her affection, Alex (Aneurin Barnard), via time.
There’s no apparent trigger for the time-hopping and it’s not likely time journey within the conventional sense – with a dominant time interval or clear narrative drive. Agnes merely wakes as herself in numerous historic eras, all the best way from the Center Ages to the 80s, more and more haunted by flashbacks of assembly Alex earlier than.
When you’ve come throughout Lowe earlier than – both in her collaborations with Brit indie filmmaker Ben Wheatley or in her directorial debut, Prevenge (2016) – the anarchic mom horror the place she stars as a mother-to-be (she was pregnant herself throughout filming) commanded to kill by her unborn foetus – you could have preconceptions of her work as comically grotesque. Timestalker is technically no much less bloody or comedian, however its tone is starkly totally different, fuelled extra by craving than fury, extra by hope than despair.
Agnes meets Alex first in 1688 when she is a Scottish spinster, and he’s about to be executed for some undefined non secular heresy. She saves his life and, in flip, loses her personal (axe straight to the brow – I instructed you it was bloody). It’s a sample that repeats. She meets him once more in 1793: Agnes a bored aristocrat with a mad pink Marie Antoinette-esque wig, eager to flee the nightly visits of her grotesque husband George (Nick Frost), and Alex a good-looking, fame-hungry highwayman. Then once more within the Eighties, when he’s an incompetent, egotistical rock star, and she or he a crazed fan. We pop into the 1800s and Nineteen Forties briefly, too – and at all times there are lush, over-the-top units, savage deaths, and unrequited love.
If it sounds bonkers, that’s as a result of it’s. However not in a wayward manner. It’s richly textured and transporting, but Lowe retains a agency grip on her story, with edits as brutal as the varied decapitations. In 1980, one of many eras Lowe devotes a major period of time to, we lower all of the sudden from scenes of Agnes in a leotard combating aerobics, to flashbacks of chasing Alex via woods centuries earlier than. The movie feels briskly paced for a wacky narrative that may in any other case come throughout as self-indulgent. It’s by no means superfluously dreamy; at 90 minutes it’s slim, by no means a second wasted.
Because the flashbacks improve, Agnes begins to recollect: this has all occurred earlier than. All the time, she begins to grasp, she is doing the chasing. Why? Is it a dream? A reminiscence? Individuals inform her she has a psychological well being subject, however maybe historical past is educating her one thing about love, about fixating on one thing exterior when the secret is inside your self. And the extra issues change the extra in addition they keep the identical, not only for Agnes however for her co-travellers, too: Tanya Reynolds (Intercourse Schooling) as her maid/confidante, Jacob Anderson as Scorpio, a cryptic bystander who could also be buddy or foe. Can anybody escape future’s merciless loops?
It’s, like her different movies, extraordinarily humorous: Lowe’s humour is of the off-kilter Monty Python selection. (There are foolish jokes about fish wives at executions, and an absurd medical therapy of syphilis involving improbably jolly medical doctors and pink steam.) However above all, this movie ripples with emotion. It’s suffused with a way of longing that lodges deep in its viewers, even when we don’t at all times totally perceive it. What do we wish and the way will we get it? Just like the tarot playing cards Agnes takes to consulting, the reply could certainly lie in dying – however maybe not the literal sort.