The Perils of Immortal Passion in Timestalker

Inspiration can strike from anywhere. For writer, director, and actor Alice Lowe, it was a fascinating artifact in the National Museum of Scotland. It’s a mask made for dissident 17th century Scottish preacher Alexander Peden to hide from authorities. Constructed of leather, fabric, feathers, wooden teeth, and human hair, it looks like an art project Leatherface abandoned for being too disturbing. “It was found in a cave,” Lowe said, “and it was bonkers .... It fascinated me.”

A version of that mask appears in Timestalker, Lowe’s inversion of the old trope of lovers divided across oceans of time. Lowe plays Agnes, who feels she is immortally bound to her eternal paramour (Aneurin Barnard). The only problem is that every time she gets close to getting her man, she gets killed. Again. And again. And again, across reincarnations, until she finally starts to get the clue that maybe the problem is her. “She’s quite thick,” Lowe said, “and to me that’s an archetype that you’re not allowed to play as a woman right now. ... The fool is an archetype, and it’s blocking off a whole area that you can’t then go into because people are scared you’re saying all women are stupid. Since when am I saying all women are anything?”

For all of Agnes’ eternities of yearning, Lowe described Timestalker as simply “masquerading as a love story, but it’s about something deeper, about identities of artists and chasing a dream.”

Not that Lowe deliberately picked that theme. “I always do this thing where I write things where I’m writing a story that is nothing to do with me, and after the fact I realize that it’s everything about my life.” The Sightseers star made her first film as a director, SXSW 2016 maternity horror Prevenge, when she had recently become a mother. By contrast, she sees Timestalker as a film about mortality. “As an actor, or an actress specifically, you’re having to reinvent yourself over and over again, or resurrect yourself to continue, and doing that with a puritanism which I recognize I have in my head, and it’s not always a good thing. It’s a strange, egotistical, narcissistic but also romantic dream.”

It took seven years to get Timestalker to the screen, during which time she had a second child and went through the pandemic, all the while hanging on to “the crazy dream” of getting another movie made. “It’s an act of sadomasochism, in a way, to even try to be an independent filmmaker, and yet you just keep going. That element of myself, I put into myself.”

Maybe that’s why Agnes’ fantasies of romance become a way to examine the line between imagination and self-delusion. More specifically, it’s about the imaginative worlds of women creatives. There have been plenty of stories about the fantastical inner lives of men, from Don Quixote through to The Fisher King. “I felt like I don’t see many female stories about that, and it felt like a hole in my experience as a film viewer. I want to see more stories about the inside of a woman’s mind.” That’s why she wrote Agnes as “an unreliable narrator who is forcing you to be part of her delusion.” She laughs. “Really, I sort of trap you in that world when you watch the film.”

Timestalker

Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere

Friday 8, 2:15pm, Rollins Theatre at The Long Center

Monday 11, 9:45pm, Alamo South Lamar

In Time: More SXSW Films About Temporal Displacement

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Things Will Be Different

Siblings make a terrible mistake when they hide in the past after a violent heist.

Monday 11, 10pm, Alamo South Lamar

Wednesday 13, 11:15am, Alamo South Lamar

Friday 15, 6:15pm, Alamo South Lamar

Omni Loop

To go back and change who you were: All it takes is a black hole in your chest.

Wednesday 13, 11am, Stateside

Thursday 14, 5:45pm, ZACH Theatre

The Greatest Hits

Old songs can take you back, but for Harriet (Lucy Boynton), that’s literal.

Thursday 14, 11:45am, Paramount Theatre