Official selection
SXSW 2024
Director
Alice Lowe
Producer
Mark Hopkins, Vaughan Sivell, Natan Stoessel, Tom Wood
Writer
Alice Lowe
Cast
Alice Lowe, Aneurin Barnard, Nick Frost, Jacob Anderson, Tanya Reynolds
contact
The Festival Agency
“Love never dies, but a lot of people do in Alice Lowe’s gloriously bloody valentine to the romantic comedy, spanning so much time that it practically goes back to the beginning of it… An ambitious project that cements Lowe as a genuine and quite visionary comedic talent”– Damon Wise, DEADLINE
“Outrageously funny… Time travel and love collide with bloody slapstick… Makes marvelous use of costumes and setting to loosely parody iconic eras of romance”– Kristy Puchko, MASHABLE
“A darkly funny, emotionally insightful time-travel comedy about a woman determinedly pursuing the supposed love of her life throughout history”– Nikki Baughan, SCREEN
We first meet Agnes (writer/director Alice Lowe, PREVENGE) in 1688 Scotland, attending a village-square execution. In a soul-altering instant, she locks eyes with the condemned (Aneurin Barnard, DUNKIRK). Agnes can sense that she’s encountered the man she’s destined to be with, rushes towards him and dies quite spectacularly in the process. In her last breaths, she vows to find him in her next life. Over a century later, Agnes has been reincarnated and is now a 1793 English noblewoman, soon to come across the reincarnation of her past life’s love. Things… could go better. And again, she dies. Next, 1847, third verse, no different from the first. The cycle continues. Can Agnes ever move on from the presumed love of her lives?
Alice Lowe is a comic visionary. As a screenwriter (SIGHTSEERS), as a comedian and actor in everything from the films of Edgar Wright and Ben Wheatley to GARTH MARENGHI'S DARKPLACE, and above all, as a wickedly talented filmmaker—her multiple award-winning 2016 debut, PREVENGE, which she wrote, directed and starred in, was a comedy-horror instant classic that made many a top-ten list at the close of its year. Now, she returns with an ingenious sophomore feature, a single story told across a multitude of centuries.
With thermonuclear levels of imagination and wit, TIMESTALKER explores how truly awful it might be if romantic love is genuinely fated, even when the match is clearly terrible, dooming us to make the same bad choice across time. Lowe’s taken the heart of the romantic comedy framework and impaled it on the sharpest critical sword imaginable. It’s bloody brilliant—and brilliantly bloody—an incredibly fun film that’s also darkly profound in its explorations of obsessive romantic ideals, and the ways that various eras of cinema have made fairy tale-like fantasy out of self-destructive fixation. With a supporting cast that includes Nick Frost (THE WORLD’S END), Jacob Anderson (GAME OF THRONES) and Tanya Reynolds (SEX EDUCATION), TIMESTALKER is an inspired, Python-esque masterpiece that proves beyond doubt that Lowe should be given the keys to every kingdom across time. – Mitch Davis
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