Rating: NR | Runtime: 89 minutes
Release Date: October 11th, 2024 (UK) / February 14th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Vertigo Releasing / Level 33 Entertainment
Director(s): Alice Lowe
Writer(s): Alice Lowe

We are all prisoners of our destiny.

Love is often found staring you right in the face. The problem, though, is that it’s not always seen. Maybe, as the 1980s version of Katie Dickie’s Marion explains, it’s because we have a penchant for loving people who hate us precisely because we hate ourselves. Or maybe it’s that we seek the impossible as a way of holding onto hope that our lives can be more than what they currently are. For Agnes (Alice Lowe) and her quest to find her beloved Alex (Aneurin Barnard) throughout time, it’s a bit of both. Low self-worth. A desire for excitement. You can also mix in an even less healthy option: the thrill of dying.

As Lowe, who also writes and directs, exclaims: “Romance is dead.” Literally. Every single time Agnes reunites with Alex, she ends up saving him from his own demise by unwittingly sacrificing herself—almost exclusively via a grisly decapitation. We must therefore ask the question of whether the cycle of destiny at the back of Timestalker is a product of giving Agnes another chance for happiness by Alex’s side or another chance to live by finally letting him go. Because he’s never looking for her. Even though their first meeting appears to portray a mutual sense of adoration, his words expose how the source is different. She loves him. He merely loves that she does.

So, beyond the subversion of rom-com sensibilities that twist the meet-cute into a trigger for reaping, there’s a lot here to say about fan culture and the ever-thinning line between romance and infatuation that parasocial relationships have cultivated. Agnes needs Alex to survive and yet he’s never thought of her once. This isn’t a tale of star-crossed lovers as much as a masochistic gauntlet of self-destruction. Because she cannot escape the pattern. She doesn’t want to escape it. Even though karma works insofar as turning her poor peasant into a queen and then back down to working class, she refuses to learn her lesson. Not like George (Nick Frost). He goes from devoted subservient to violent oppressor.

His is a character you might not think will play as large a role in the over-arching message as Jacob Anderson’s Scipio or Tanya Reynolds’ Meg, but I’d argue George is the second most vital piece of the whole behind Agnes. Scipio is intriguing in his position as a voyeur puppet master, but he’s more of a distraction so Agnes doesn’t cut her strings than an agent of change. Meg is that love that stares her in the face. A sweet, kind soul who might put Agnes on too high a pedestal, but remains everything she wishes Alex could be. She’s the goal. And the counterpoint. Meg is there to provide an out and thus to be seen as a taunt that keeps pushing Agnes to Alex.

George, conversely, is Agnes. He does to her what she does to Alex, albeit in an overtly cruel way towards her when Agnes is overtly cruel to herself. He stalks her like she stalks Alex—each one makers of their own sociopathic murder boards while deluding themselves into believing them to be shrines. When Agnes can’t get what she wants, she sacrifices herself to try again. When George doesn’t, he sacrifices her to satisfy his rage. Is one worse than the other? Definitely. That doesn’t, however, mean the other is good. Both are damaging and dangerous. Both are selfish. And yet the alternative seems worst of all: to simply exist without the ability to love or be loved. Is that even living?

Lowe packs a ton of messaging into a very tightly wound package from patriarchy to feminism and fate to free will. Because it must move so fast, some things do get left by the wayside. Some from the often broad humor that doesn’t quite match the earnestness of the themes and some from the constant back and forth that both advances us through unnecessary centuries and leaves what look like unnecessary centuries shrouded in secrecy until the time is right. Timestalkers can therefore alternately feel too flippant and not flippant enough—the tonal balance between comedic juxtapositions and metaphor proving adversarial instead of complementary. It works more than not, though. Especially its table-turn wink of an ending.

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Aneurin Barnard and Alice Lowe in TIMESTALKER; courtesy Ludovic Robert/HanWay.