13/10/24

The Cameo, Edinburgh

The release of a new Alice Lowe film is a cause for celebration. Actor/writer/director – and as far as I know, she might do the catering as well – Lowe is adept at ensuring that a modest budget goes a long, long way. Her debut feature, Prevenge, was released way back in 2017, shot while she was pregnant (of course it was), so Timestalker has been many years in ahem… gestation. It’s probably best described as a fantasy set across hundreds of years, and the central theme is the general futility of pursuing the heart’s desire.

We first meet Agnes (Lowe) in the 1600s in Scotland, where she’s a lonely spinster, much gossiped about by her neighbours, who pays the occasional visit to a masked preacher, a man given to talking about the dawning of a new religion. When said preacher is arrested and brought to a public place for torture and execution (they made their own entertainment those days), his mask is removed, revealing the handsome face of actor Aneurin Barnard. Agnes is instantly and irrevocably smitten. Attempting to approach him, she trips and falls face first onto the executioner’s axe, which is the bloody end of her.

Except that it’s not. She’s promptly reborn in the 1790s, rich but bored, with a toxic husband played by Nick Frost. This Agnes has a penchant for wearing some truly monumental wigs but she’s missing something in her life. When she spies the visage of a handsome highwayman – Barnard again – her passion is reignited and she is, once more, in pursuit of love. But of course it’s doomed to end badly. With each transformation, her luck fails to improve and an added problem is that every new persona harbours memories of the one before… and where exactly does Cleopatra fit into all this?

Lowe’s sparky script is laced with deadpan humour, and cinematographer Ryan Eddleston has a lot of fun aping the look of celebrated films. If the opening sequence is Witchfinder General, then the 80s New Romantic section has the muted, pastel tones of Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance – and Lowe has the perm to back it up. Sadly, the budget doesn’t quite stretch to making the Manhattan locations look entirely convincing.

Tanya Reynolds does a good job of embodying the various iterations of Agnes’s perennial sidekick, Meg, and Jacob Anderson is quietly impressive as different versions of a character simply known as Scipio. Frost continues to be suitably malevolent in every loathsome bloke he portrays.

While it might sound faintly bewildering on the page, the myriad twists and turns of the plot are confidently handled and there are some cleverly placed visual clues – a huge heart hidden in a forest, a brightly plumaged songbird in a cage – to keep reminding us of what’s gone before.

As ever with Lowe’s work, the spirit of pure invention is kept proudly to the fore and I find myself wondering what this formidable film maker could achieve given a hundred-million-dollar budget. Until that unlikely event actually happens, why not seek out your nearest independent cinema and sample the delights of her latest gem? It’s well worth your time and money.

4 stars

Philip Caveney