Towards the beginning of 2004, Channel 4 in the UK broadcast a TV show which really seemed to have very little impact at the time – but, in retrospect, looks like a bit of a (delete according to taste) Monty Python or Magnificent Seven moment: it brought together a group of people most of whom went on to significant later success. The show was called Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, and the main contributors, most of them irritatingly multi-talented, were Matthew Holness (actor, writer, director, novelist), Richard Ayoade (actor, writer, director), Matt Berry (actor, writer, singer, composer) and Alice Lowe (actress, writer, director). Ayoade and Berry in particular have become almost ubiquitous for things like Travel Man, Submarine, the Souvenir movies, the What We Do In The Shadows TV show, the Toast series, voice work on Star Wars, and so on, while Holness has concentrated more on writing and directing.

Alice Lowe isn't quite so well known – she herself has spoken of the other three all being offered big parts in the same major TV series without having to audition, while she had to read for a small guest role – but we have previously encountered her in the Scrabble-related comedy-drama Always Sometimes Never, and Ben Wishaw's paean to caravanning and serial murder, Sightseers. Both of these are reasonably representative of the sort of things Lowe has been up to – quirky, intelligent, somewhat under the radar, modestly-budgeted genre movies. Her own movie Prevenge (about a pregnant mass-murderer goaded on by the psychic voice of her own unborn child) got some good notices, and attention. It has taken a while for her to follow up on this, but it has arrived, in the form of Timestalker.

It's a very 80s title and it wouldn't have been at all surprising if that was what Lowe had decided to have a go at. In the end� well, it isn't really that. As the film opens she plays Agnes, a housewife living in Scotland in 1688. Life is fairly humdrum, until one day she goes along to see the torture and execution of a heretic (a popular social event in her village). However, when she lays eyes on the man who is to be killed (Aneurin Barnard), it is as if a thunderbolt has struck her and she is enraptured by him. This results in some confusion, during which she regrettably takes a pike to the head and expires.

The film is not as short as this makes it sound. Agnes finds herself living the life of an English noblewoman over a century later and deeply unfulfilled. She has vague snippets of memory of the 17th century, and one of her previous incarnation's old friends is still around, as her servant (Tanya Reynolds). So is her dog, but somewhat unexpectedly for her, he has been reincarnated as her husband (Nick Frost), and his manners have not improved.

Things change when her path crosses that of the local dashing highwayman, whom she instantly recognises as the object of her desire. Perhaps they are meant to be together this time? Er, well, not quite: Agnes soon finds herself in the Victorian period, unfulfilled and fascinated by her elusive beau as ever.

At this point it feels pretty obvious which way the film is going to go: as a kind of broad, off-beat comic-horror with plenty of costume changes and elaborately-choreographed death scenes – a kind of cross between Final Destination and Quantum Leap. But it doesn't – instead, the film beds down in New York City in the year 1980 for an extended period. (This is a brave and challenging choice for a visibly low-budget film made entirely on location in Wales.)

And the tone of it changes, too – this is one of those movies which shifts and shimmers like a chimera, never being just one thing for very long. The question, of course, is whether this is a deliberate creative choice or just the product of an inconsistently-written script and the savage limitations of the Ffilm Cymru Wales production budget. (Not entirely convincing though the New York exteriors may be, they don't share the Blake's 7-ish quality that the film's visit to a dystopian future has.)

I'm inclined to give Lowe the benefit of the doubt, I think. The film is called Timestalker for a reason, as her character really is obsessively pursing Barnard's character through time and space. (And yet she remains broadly sympathetic – which means this is either someone threading a difficult needle, or a questionable representation of how non-consensual, asymmetrical relationships actually function. At least the film is a lot less likely to get sued than Baby Reindeer.) Perhaps Agnes is redeemed a little by her gradual recognition that – and here we find metaphor made concrete, a classic genre move – she is trapped in a cycle where her relationships endlessly and fruitlessly repeat themselves, as she chases after the wrong man.

It's a neat piece of writing, if nothing else, and it makes for an unexpectedly affecting conclusion – but people overcoming their issues and achieving some kind of self-actualisation is a sure-fire way of achieving a feel-good moment at the cinema. There are even a couple of musical numbers and a dance to mark the moment, and more upbeat than the ones in the Joker sequel too.

Even so, I'm not sure the film doesn't work better and feel more confident when it's just trying to be an off-beat horror-comedy with some SF elements. That's certainly where you would expect to find most of the people in it – though, as they say, if you can play comedy well, you can play anything. Nick Frost certainly exercises his usual dark powers and threatens to steal the film from Alice Lowe, but in the end she manages to retain it. She's moving in the more serious parts, but funny as well – and the film makes space for other women like Reynolds and Kate Dickie to come in and be funny, too. (Not that the film is dogmatic about this – people like Mike Wozniak get cameos as well.)

The lower reaches of the British film industry are quite good at this sort of off-beat genre-adjacent kind of film, usually the product of a unique vision (I remember Julian Barrett's Mindhorn from a few years ago being another good example). Timestalker is a bit more out there than most, and perhaps it suffers a little bit from sounding like a spoof. It is, as I say, a hard film to pin down, but an entertaining and distinctive one. Hopefully we will see more from Alice Lowe in the not too distant future.

Awix

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