Timestalker (2024)

[BluBonnet]

Alice Lowe’s Timestalker Is A Comedic Fantasy Romance About Reincarnation, With Nods To Dario Argento

It’s been a good few years now since Alice Lowe unleashed her directorial debut on the world – 2016’s Prevenge, the prenatal slasher movie she wrote, directed and starred in during her own pregnancy. In 2024, she’s back with her long-awaited follow-up, Timestalker – a completely different, even more ambitious feature set to transcend not just genre boundaries, but time and space itself.
Ostensibly, it’s a comedic love story set across multiple time periods, in which characters played by Lowe and Aneurin Barnard find each other through the ages in different lives – taking inspiration from everything from Barry Lyndon to Working Girl. “It’s quite a difficult film to describe,” Lowe laughs, speaking to Empire about what she has in store this time. “It’s a romcom, it’s about reincarnation, it’s a fantasy – and in a way it’s a bit of a love letter to cinema, because every historical period is kinda based on a different film genre or trope. Which has been super-fun.” Those historical periods include Georgian England, Jacobean Scotland, the dawn of time itself – plus, a look ahead to a dystopian future.
Timestalker’s time-bending narrative is the perfect setting for Lowe’s playful filmmaking, where the collision of historical eras allows for an array of visual styles. The film is “not quite a typical period drama – there’ll be the odd glimpse of something that’s anachronistic,” the director teases. “That’s some of the most fun that we’ve had, just going, ‘We can make this look like a Dario Argento film!’ Just because it’s set in the Georgian era doesn’t mean we can’t have a giallo horror moment.” A time-hopping, comedic fantasy romance with blasts of vibrant horror? Sounds like an Alice Lowe movie, then.