Timestalker

I am a fan of Jacob Anderson's music and film work so Timestalker came to my attention since he plays a key role in it. Timestalker was written, directed and stars Alice Lowe and I saw it at my local film festival. This recurring love story could easily be described as a hilarious mixture of the songs Love Stinks by The J. Geils Band and Blasphemous Rumors by Depeche Mode. It was a joy to watch Jacob, Alice and the rest of the cast deftly play their parts and look like they were having the best time ever. The movie has some shockingly gory bits but provides a refreshingly novel comedic take on the broader themes of destiny and self determination. This movie was brilliant and I hope all of you will hunt down ... or stalk even :) ... opportunities to see it.

Quirky Brit dark-comedienne Alice Lowe follows her fine writer / director debut "Prevenge" (after previously co-writing "Sightseers") with the ambitious "Timestalker" whose quirkiness disappointingly so out-weighs its dark comedy that it flops, badly. She plays various re-incarnated ladies over several different centuries whose only similarity seems to be that while plagued by Nick Frost their obsessive love for Aeurin Barnard causes their death (as witnessed by Jacob Anderson & Tanya Reynolds). The ultimate point is perhaps known only to Lowe, which may not've mattered if the film was funny... but no it's not - so this is sadly a low for Lowe.

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.

The concept was a good one but failed in its execution, At the same time the acting was surprisingly good - at least up to the point I fell asleep and had to rewatch 30 minutes, The script was mediocre, the title misleading.

Watchable visually in terms of changing scenes and time periods and entertaining in parts for sure, with a few early laughs, but ultimately it turned into a yawn fest, like one of those experimental worthy Channel 4 movies circa 1983.

If it's supposed to be a comedy it's not funny enough. If it's supposed to be romantic, it isn't in the slightest. If it's supposed to sci-fi, it's low-fi. Odd for the sake of it and the gore is unnecessary when portraying the main character dying over and over again., Subtlety would have worked better. Could have been a genuine cult classic but missed the target, if you pardon the knife-throwing pun : A lost opportunity that turned into a mish-mash.

Agnes (Alice Lowe) has lived many lives, in 1680s Scotland, in 1790s England, in 1840s Britain, in 1980s New York, and more. And in every life, she meets the one man (Aneurin Barnard) whom she is destined to be with - but just as they are meeting, something dreadful happens and she dies. Until she meets him again in the next life, that is....

Alice Lowe wrote, directed and stars in this film, which is quite funny and which has lovely supporting characters played by Jacob Anderson, Nick Frost and Tanya Reynolds, who like Agnes all have just one name throughout the film (unlike the love of her life who goes by different names in each incarnation). You might think the premise would get a bit repetitive over time, and it does, but there are enough differences of setting and methods of living and/or dying that those repetitions didn't bother me. If you believe in reincarnation and love as destiny, then this movie is for you; if you don't, you'll understand why the film is titled as it is. Recommended.