Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024: Timestalker, by Simon Read

Alice Lowe is no stranger to the Edinburgh Festival scene. I first saw her performing alongside Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness in the Fringe stage show of Garth Marenghi’s Fright Knight in the year 2000, when I was a sixteen-year-old goth. Over two decades later, I’m now a forty-year-old goth, and Lowe has brought her second feature film, Timestalker, to the EIFF, where it has played to rave reviews. It’s always a good sign when the public screenings are sold out, but the press showing I attended was packed too – an even better sign. Lowe’s first film, Prevenge, was a darkly comic psychological horror film about a pregnant woman whose unborn child seems to be communicating to her, urging her to commit grisly murders – and it caused quite a stir in the underground horror scene in the UK and abroad, transcending its low budget with intelligent writing and some startling cinematography.

Her latest film is not a horror, but retains the streak of macabre humour which has always run through her work. Lowe plays Agnes, a lovesick woman, reincarnated throughout the centuries, as she searches for her perfect man. We first meet Agnes in 1688, as she watches a thief (Aneurin Barnard) about to be hanged at the gallows. A tragically short-lived Elizabethan meet-cute occurs before we skip forward to 1793, where a reincarnated Agnes lives a privileged, albeit dull life with her lady-in-waiting, Meg (Tanya Reynolds).

The Georgian Agnes lives amongst the landed gentry, is into big frocks, and even bigger wigs, but must contend with her wealthy landowner husband George (Nick Frost), whom she considers a boorish pig. Agnes hears tales of a handsome highwayman, and so takes deliberately slow carriage rides through the countryside in the hope of finding herself confronted by this mysterious brigand (Barnard again) who finally robs her, only to leave her heartbroken once more. Agnes is reincarnated every time she falls in love, and she can’t seem to help making the same mistakes over and again.

The philosopher Fernando Pessoa wrote than the emotions that cause the greatest pain are those absurd longings we have for impossible things. In part because – like romanticised or predestined ‘true love‘ – they are absurd. His theory that we search for a nostalgia for a thing that never was seems to hang over Agnes every time she loops around for another shot at life and love, and finds only dissatisfaction, boredom, and her trusty antique dildo. The one constant in her life(s) is Meg, whether as a servant, a co-worker or a friend, she is the only one who offers Agnes unconditional love and support – but Agnes is either too self-involved, or too blinded by desire to see the value in Meg’s affections.

I spoke to Lowe at a press event, and suggested that Agnes might not actually be a very nice person (I hoped that was okay to say) and she confirmed that, yes, Agnes is meant to be an obsessive and often selfish character. When Meg asks Agnes why she puts up with her cruel and ugly husband in the 1790s, she responds quickly, “Because I like nice things!” leaving us to wonder if her desire for true love is superseded by her need to be pampered and powdered.

The narrative of the film skips through many eras. We see Agnes as a 1980s aerobics fanatic, still mooning over Barnard (here a New Romantic pop star named Adam Phoenix) and even witness Ages dressed as Cleopatra, although the film tricks us a few times with staging and costuming, and we have to hustle to keep up. Does Agnes remember her past mistakes? Possibly. When she reads about Adam Phoenix, she sighs theatrically, “New Romantic? I remember when it was just ‘romantic’“. But remembering isn’t the same as learning, and through all the pratfalls and furtive introductions, the tapestry of Agnes’ lives is a painful landscape; she seems destined to a life of profound unhappiness.

The moment in the film in which, having been blinkered to the point of obliviousness, she realises just how much Meg cares for her (and always has) has a bittersweet quality. What is sadder than never finding the love you think you deserve, is finding it, only to discover it resolutely unrequited. I think Pessoa would agree. To choose an impossible love is to choose an escape from real life, and when Agnes confronts Adam Phoenix backstage at his concert, and hurls herself at him, with her Princess Diana hair and ’80s power suit, is she subconsciously pulling the ugly curtain of reality down onto the stage of her own existence? Adam doesn’t know her. She only thinks she knows him. She might die to immortalise him, but would he even notice, let alone care?

By the time we reach a more contemporary era, the 2010s, the film itself begins to fracture slightly. It’s here we see Agnes as perhaps the ultimate version of herself, as the story dissolves into something more abstract (there is a song-and-dance number, a punks vs cops theme, all pretty left field) and we even sense that perhaps she is beginning to move on. Barnard is now one of the cops, having evolved from condemned thief to dashing outlaw and literal rock star, he has become the ultimate symbol of the establishment, a member of the police.

Timestalker is a huge step up for Lowe in terms of production values and ambition of story. The costume budget alone must have eclipsed the entirety of Prevenge, and Lowe confirmed that the Georgian era sets and wigs and carriages are a deliberate nod to Kubrick and Barry Lyndon, (“It was kind of inevitable, plus you can’t go wrong with a corset!“).

With supporting turns from Kate Dickie and Mike Wozniak, both of whom stared in Lowe’s previous film, it feels as though she’s growing as a film-maker and really finding her voice as a writer. I can’t wait to see what she does next.