Time Travel Is Dangerous

Bluesky

“I’d say it’s a wormhole, but I don’t actually know what a wormhole is.”

Ruth (Ruth Syratt) and Megan (Megan Stevenson) are not trained time travellers. A pair of middle aged vintage shop owners who happened across a time machine when it was left out by the bins, they immediately saw its potential to boost their business. Why spend hours each day hunting around in our time for valuable objects that they could pick up in an instant simply by popping back to the appropriate period in history? Naturally they treat it as a trade secret, though there isn’t really any trading involved – they just help themselves and then leg it – but as their modest Muswell Hill enterprise fills up with museum-quality artefacts, they nonetheless begin to attract attention.

Delivered in traditional English deadpan style, with supporting narration by Stephen Fry which owes a lot to the BBC’s adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, this is a film which could easily have fallen flat but manages to work thanks to a combination of careful pacing and well balanced performances. Before long, our heroines fall in with a society of inventors whose unlikely creations recall those showcased on early Eighties television programmes which gently teased eccentric scientists at a point when their profession as a whole was still treated with respect. Indeed, it turns out that one of the inventors is himself the former host of a TV series, and he knows a few things about time travel. First amongst these is something so important that, well, they put it in the title. Not that Ruth and Megan are terribly good at listening.

What follows trades heavily on nostalgia, but that’s not to say that it lacks any substance of its own. The story, though simple, is well worked out, and the fact that it fizzles out a bit at the end isn’t a big problem because it suits the characters. There are lots of great supporting turns, with Brian Bovell spot on as the celebrity scientist and nice work from Guy Henry as the society’s peevishly overbearing leader. Personal issues and the trials of day to day life prove just as consuming as radiation sickness and the potential collapse of the space-time continuum, especially after Ruth undergoes an unexpected transformation. In the end, however, everyone will have to step up their game in order to take control of a crisis situation.

There is a certain amount of self-indulgence here, especially towards the end, and the film sometimes overplays its hand. That said, if you successfully connect with the characters, you’re unlikely to care. A very effective piece of low budget storytelling, making its Nineties-era special effects into a selling point, Time Travel Is Dangerous puts in the effort to endear itself to its audience, and is likely to win some loyal fans in the process.