Stalk This Way

Genre auteur Alice Lowe talks about her new timeywimey romcom Timestalker

- STEVE O'BRIEN

“LIKE A SCREWED-UP DOCTOR Who,” is how actor/writer/director Alice Lowe describes her latest film, a bruise-black romcom about a woman named Agnes who repeatedly falls for the wrong guy, dies a horrible death, and gets reincarnated a century or so later, before the whole grisly cycle starts over again.

Timestalker is another characteristically left-field idea from the woman who brought us the similarly deranged pregnancy horror Prevenge in 2016. And though it’s moderately more accessible than her splattery debut, it’s not what you’d necessarily call commercial.

“I wanted to be ambitious with the film,” Lowe tells Red Alert, “because I know how unusual it is to get to make a movie, and I felt like, surely I’m at the point now where I can compromise less about what I want to do. That means that it is a risk for financiers, because it is so singular as a vision.”

Though Timestalker isn’t a time travel story as such, the various time periods (the film pings from 1688 to 1793 to 1847 to 1980 to 2117) all intersect with each other, with recurring echoes and motifs. Lowe says she chose time periods that show “the evolution of our idea of romance”.