Timestalker: Alice Lowe is dying for love in this gag-and-gore-strewn comedy

Death becomes Alice Lowe. Strictly in creative terms, of course. Whether co-creating caravanning serial-killers in 2012’s Sightseers, or starring in her directorial debut, the antenatal comedy-slasher Prevenge (2016), Lowe’s work has always been gleefully gruesome. Here, she’s dying for love as writer-director-star of a dreamily macabre comedy, in which the obsessive Agnes finds herself locked in a time-skipping doomed love story, set to repeat through the ages. It kicks off as a spoofy supernatural romance, in which 17th-century Scottish weaver Agnes pricks her finger and is instantly smitten with Aneurin Barnard’s rakish dissident ‘field preacher’ Alex, but slides smoothly from Outlander bodice-ripper to the grisliest of gags: running to save Alex from the executioner’s axe, Agnes falls on to a pike blade and dies. While the villagers gawp at her death, Alex escapes, kicking off centuries of pursuit by the reincarnated Agnes.

Chasing after her man with a determination that would shame Inspector Javert, Agnes must make terrible, blackly comic sacrifices across the centuries, which play out in a string of fervid period tales that mock the idea of ‘soulmates’. These swoony, hilariously heightened encounters set Agnes hunting the elusive Alex as a Georgian highwayman, a fleet-footed Victorian gentleman, even a foul-mouthed 1980s new romantic pop star. Unwrapping the story any further would spoil its delicious deadpan gags, as well as the sudden dramatic zigzags that make you reappraise everything that’s gone before. But Lowe crafts each encounter so distinctly, giving them such engagingly different tones and comic moods from slapstick to pop parody, that the viewer stays hungry for the next lurid turn of events.

Though the repeating time-loop romance suggests Timestalker will make a cosy double-bill with The Beast (2023), it’s a different animal from Bertrand Bonello’s twisty, dread-fuelled sci-fi drama. This film takes us deep into clumsy, self-absorbed Agnes’s POV as she plots ceaselessly to catch Alex, obsessing over recurrent clues (a red bird, a yapping dog, a pink heart) that herald each encounter. She’s a challenging, often unlikeable character, engrossed in her fantasies of immortal love. Lowe, a skilled portraitist of delusional female thinking, makes the script tease us mercilessly about Agnes’s true feelings and the nature of her determination. Is she a diehard romantic or a dogged, self-deluding stalker? Does she seek freedom or eternal bondage?

Agnes’s gag-and-gore-strewn pursuit of love also lets Lowe ruthlessly pillory the endless reincarnation tropes in romantic dramas. Much of the comedy derives from parodying the overblown twinned-fates melodrama that powers Somewhere in Time (1980) or The Fountain (2006). High-born Georgian-era Agnes haunts the highwayman’s woods in her carriage, angling to be abducted by the thieving Alex, while 1980s Agnes fights other fans for pop-star Alex’s discarded cigarette butt with the ferocity of a pro wrestler. Though these sequences have a cheerful, pratfall-loving Pythonesque feel, horror cinephile Lowe also digs enthusiastically into the darker, fixated side of Agnes’s quest. There’s a strong giallo psycho-horror flavour coming through the flamboyant Argento-like slicks of luridly magenta blood and the pulsing pink heart symbols that recur in Agnes’s every incarnation.

Wittily, the film extends the reincarnation theme as far as recycling settings and actors. Threaded alongside Agnes through time are a gently exasperated Tanya Reynolds as her best friend, Nick Frost’s dangerously boorish paramour and Jacob Anderson, popping up as a slyly knowing observer prodding Agnes into self-realisation. A swaggering Barnard, all curled lip and Marc Bolan curls, is the very model of the unattainable foppish cad. They play within period-perfect settings, cinematographer Ryan Eddleston, crafting ‘film real’ grainy candlelit looks for the Barry ­Lyndon-styled Georgian story, while a quick-cut MTV-styled song montage announces 1980s Agnes, in a fond, winking parody. Combined with Lowe’s determinedly modern dialogue, all this occasionally gives the film a Horrible Histories sketch-show feel, and creates a fitful choppy pace when combined with eruptions of fantasy flashbacks illustrating Agnes’s whirling, time-leaping thoughts.

A rollicking, risk-taking and deftly funny subversion of fairytale romance, Timestalker shows off Lowe’s admirable ambition, even when her reach exceeds her grasp. Hidden under the film’s wilful theatricality and dark laughs, there’s a bittersweet layer of regret for the centuries of lost time women have devoted to the fantasy of eternal love. Lowe makes sharp points here as well as good jokes, recognising how chasing ‘soulmate’ romance warps women’s expectations of men till they’ll settle for “someone with his own teeth and a driving licence”.

► Timestalker arrives in UK cinemas 11 October.