Film Review: Timestalker

According to the writer and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant, “the modern love plot requires that, if you are a woman, you must at least entertain believing in love’s capacity both to rescue you from your life and to give you a new one”. “To be needed,” they continue, “demonstrates your feminine worth”. It is this belief, so often celebrated by cinema’s love stories, which is taken to task in Alice Lowe’s Timestalker—a film that examines the corrosive impact of the modern love plot on women’s agency.

A self-styled historical science fiction romantic comedy, the film follows an guileless woman named Agnes (Lowe) who repeatedly falls in love with the elusive Alex (Aneurin Barnard). In the course of pursuing her love interest, Agnes dies a series of gruesome deaths, only to be reincarnated in another century and begin her search all over again. Her time-hopping adventure takes her from Restoration Scotland, to Georgian England, to 1980s New York, and beyond, betraying a debt to Virginia Woolf’s classic work of feminist fiction, Orlando. Following in tow is an eclectic cast of characters who, like Agnes and Alex, also seem able to defy death: the loyal but outspoken Meg (Tanya Reynolds), the enigmatic Scipio (Jacob Anderson), and the terrible George (Nick Frost). 

The film playfully embraces the theatricality of its premise. At one point, a weary Meg tells Agnes, “life isn’t a dress rehearsal”, to which Agnes responds: “Isn’t it?”. The recurring presences of masks and mimes reflects this interest in pageantry and roleplaying, bringing the film’s attempt to probe the depths of its own artifice into focus. But beneath this trans-historical masquerade is a more potent critique of the romantic fantasies we tell ourselves; of the tired tropes and worn-out tales of love and longing that serve as the inspiration for countless books, songs, and, of course, films. 

Indeed the film subtly hints at how it is part of an industry which has for so long worked to perpetuate these romantic stereotypes, thus dramatising its relationship to this broader tradition. The opening shot sees Agnes wistfully working a loom; as the light from the barn door catches and refracts in the spinning wheel, it casts a momentary shadow, emulating, in effect, the reels of film passing through a projector. The scene is there to suggest that this is a film about film, as well as its modes of representation.

It complements this exploration of love, romance, and femininity by engaging a number of other cinematic precedents. The use of pastel colours recalls the cinematography of Sofia Coppola, while the use of soft focus photography self-consciously evokes the classic Hollywood film. In this way, the imagery reflects Agnes’s rose-tinted perspective. But the world of the film also seems strange and unfamiliar. Surreal settings and transitions create a sense of disorientation, giving the film a dream-like, even nightmarish quality that works to distort the conventional grammar of the genre.

This wry distortion of the modern love plot is further echoed in the way the film poignantly pokes fun at the characters the self-mythologising. Agnes’s visions of having been Cleopatra hint at the possibility of a grandiose past, but others, too, seem to share these memories. Her desire to see herself reflected in the grand narratives of history, literature, and film can only lead, it seems, to forms of self-delusion. More damaging than Agnes’s misguided belief in her own cosmic significance, however, is society’s incessant idolisation of men. This is particularly true of Alex, who, despite being little more than a bumbling fool, finds himself cast as a brooding Byronic hero.

Yet if primary interest lies in the would-be relationship between Agnes and Alex, then it is at the expense of the film’s other characters. The social implications of Meg’s identity as a queer woman and Scipio’s status as a Black man in a number hostile historical contexts are largely left to the imagination—a reminder, perhaps, of how other’s stories are often lost amidst the dominant culture’s relentless obsession with heteronormative romance. 

One of the primary questions driving the film, then, is how to break out of the vicious cycle of the modern love plot. The image of a caged canary—itself something of a tired trope—is used to hint at the possibility of such a liberation. But the answer cannot simply be to set the bird free; as Agnes discovers, canaries don’t tend to do well outside their natural habitat. Rather, the solution, or so the film suggests, is to find new ways of caring for it. In this, the film offers a fitting metaphor for the romance genre itself, which, while often restricted by its own conventions, might still be worthy of saving.  

Timestalker is showing at Nottingham's Broadway Cinema.