Many of Alice Lowe’s spoofs are very funny. She was an essential part of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace back in 2004, as the absurd psychic Dr Liz Asher. She’s been in Little Britain, Black Books, The Mighty Boosh and Black Mirror. In Horrible Histories, she was peculiarly well-suited to playing famous figures from the past, such as Joan of Arc and the hapless Lady Jane Grey, not up to speed with what was happening to her.
She co-wrote and starred in Ben Wheatley’s brilliant Sightseers, a tale of two dim caravanners from Birmingham on a murderous road trip that was the funniest British film of 2012. Somehow it melded together not just comedy and horror, a familiar enough pairing, but also genuine social observation and travelogue, giving a fair account of the premier visitor attractions of the north.
Alice Lowe’s first film as writer-director and star, Prevenge (2016), scripted in a fortnight, shot in just 11 days in Cardiff, was less successful. Lowe, pregnant at the time, played a deranged mum-to-be, casually butchering annoying men and women at the dictates of her unborn baby. I found it nasty without being funny, Lowe peculiarly flat-toned. Perhaps I wasn’t the ideal audience. Writing for this magazine, Sarah Ditum was thrilled: “Contemplating all kinds of fictional female violence gives me a deep and holy satisfaction,” she said. Fair warning.
Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature, has been in development for eight years. It was shot in just 22 days, again in Wales, funded by the British Film Institute and Ffilm Cymru Wales. She plays Agnes, a credulous fool reincarnated in various historical epochs who believes she is destined to be the eternal lover of a handsome young man, Alex (Aneurin Barnard), but finds herself always frustrated, invariably meeting a bloody end.
In Scotland in 1688, Agnes leaves her spinning wheel to attend the execution of a heretical preacher, Alexander McBean, falling for him instantly. “Will we see each other again?” she asks prophetically. Rushing towards him, she trips on her annoying Scottie dog, George, and fatally impales her head on a poleaxe. In the confusion, Alex escapes. And off we go.
Timestalker is not just a reincarnation comedy, it’s a recycling bin. The same actors, props and settings appear over and over again. Next, it’s 1793. Agnes is lavishly dressed, bewigged and living in a stately home in Essex, married to a fat, syphilitic oaf, George (Nick Frost), who growls and barks like a dog. “I cannot help but seem to crave for something I have lost,” she tells her maid, Meg (Tanya Reynolds). “Is it your dildo, mistress? I found it under the bed,” says Meg, helpfully proffering a fine piece of treen. It is not. As soon as she sees the local highwayman, Alex Nine-Ribbons, she pursues him. It does not end well. Agnes yanks off jealous George’s poxy nose, and he beheads her.
After a montage of Agnes’s fruitless pursuits in different epochs, including a scene of a primitive Alex running away from her in a luridly pink Stone Age, there’s a refreshingly brief episode in 1847. Chaste spinster Agnes spies her destined love in a country churchyard and runs after him, calling, “Sir! Sir!” A coach and horses rush by, knocks her down and bloodily decapitates her. Alex strolls on.
The longest section is set in a sketchily indicated New York in 1980. Alex Phoenix is a preening New Romantic pop star; Agnes, his big-haired stalker fan. “We’re meant to be together,” she tells her feminist friend Meg, adding that she’d rather be a slave than a lesbian. But she’s finally getting some insight into her fate. “I never get him, I die every time. I meet my soulmate, I save his life and then my head comes off.”
We’ve all been there. In her “Director’s Statement”, Lowe says she wanted to reflect “the eternal humiliation that is the search for love. And the tyranny of the narratives we’re taught. Real life can just never match up to it. We make the same mistakes over and over.” A classic theme: vide Madame Bovary.
Timestalker, however, fell completely flat for me. Unlike the grounded Sightseers, this film has no real life, no shareable feeling: the subversion and deflation seem pointless, never funny. Why spoof a spoof?
Lowe has also insisted that the film is a metaphor for the challenges of independent filmmaking. “There were so many times when it nearly died, and we had to revive it, and reincarnate it in a way.” A cycle of suffering that might be better ended.
Timestalker is in cinemas now
[See also: “The Outrun” almost makes a great success out of an improbably adaptation]
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This article appears in the 09 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, 100 days that shook Labour