Sean Parker
There are two types of people in this world: those who love the wry, witty humor of Christopher Guest and those who just don’t get it. Mockumentaries like Waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, and Best in Show have been lauded for their sardonic and dry humor. If you’re a fan of any of those three titles, you may just fall head over heels for Time Travel is Dangerous, which blends together What We Do in the Shadows, Spinal Tap, and Back to the Future to great effect. Director Chris Reading’s silly and spirited mockumentary about two best friends traversing the past to stock their vintage store shelves is a laugh riot with all the markings of a cult classic. It’s also the Christopher Guest-style comedy we need right now.
Time Travel is Dangerous drops us into the middle of Ruth (Ruth Syratt) and Megan’s (Megan Stevenson) vintage store, Cha Cha Cha, in the north London suburb of Muswell Hill. Cha Cha Cha has recently found a bit of good fortune, and sales seem to be up as people are coming from all over to purchase the shop’s rare items. But where could they have found such a machine that would allow them to jump back in time, absconding with goods to bring back? Out by the bins, of course. The ladies visit Medieval England and the Wild West, among other points in time, stealing period-specific trinkets and trifles to bring to their store. Everything helps to keep their costs low in this economy.
The viewer’s imagination is the key element to Chris Reading’s DIY comedy. From the first sight of the DeLorean-ified bumper car, audience members will know whether they’re on board with Reading’s holistic approach to time travel or thoroughly disenchanted by the film’s utter absurdity. Once the method of time travel is revealed, along with their wryly delivered limited understanding of how the device works, you’re either all in, or you’ll know the film might not satisfy your funny bone. But, if you like the ingenuity behind films like Be Kind Rewind or Dave Made a Maze, which creatively use what’s available to address high concepts within their stories, you’ll find more opportunities for laughs in some of the film’s more inventive scenes.
As characters Ruth and Megan seem banal at first. Speaking to the cameras in the film’s opening montage, you’d think these are boring people with below-average intelligence living in an ordinary, uninspiring place where they’re guaranteed to do very little with the rest of their lives. I mean, they’ve had one of the keys to the universe land in their laps, and they’re not trying to change history beyond something like a dead man’s cowboy hat or misplaced medieval sword. Hell, they’re not even attempting a sports almanac bet that will alter their futures. They just want the ability to provide for people in their secondhand shop, which only makes Ruth and Megan more fascinating as it suggests why their escapades haven’t caused timeline instability… Yet.
Eccentricities aside, Ruth and Megan’s tone and facial expressions contradict the words flowing from their lips. These two just may be the most interesting people in the world, yet they seem nonchalant about their experiences across time. They even tell their interviewers exactly where their time travel device resides, as if it’s just a means of transportation. Their aloof mindset to the gravity and potential dangers of what they possess never really seeps through, even plopping their trade secret in a local advertisement.
When Ruth and Megan receive a warning from the Technology Engineering Scientific Thought and Innovation Society (TESTIS), warning them how delicate the timeline is and shouldn’t be tampered with, it forces Cha Cha Cha’s shop owners to go back to old-school methods of yard sales and dumpster dives. But as business starts to drop off, they resort back to being pilfering time pirates and accidentally begin tearing a hole in the space-time continuum, linking other periods with a monster-filled limbo-like environment outside of space and time, known as The Unreason (which also happens to be the name of the short film that started it all).
I genuinely fell for this charming and unique science fiction comedy, which is refreshingly funny and intelligently irreverent. But there are moments within Time Travel is Dangerous where the narrative takes a bit of a sabbatical. As it ramps up toward its finale, the film takes a sitcomish left turn as Ruth is transformed into her teenage self. While it becomes the setup for narrative actions, the whole episode feels additional and doesn’t completely fit. The audience becomes used to the Ab Fab relationship between Ruth and Megan, and the detour takes away from that. Don’t get me wrong, Time Travel is Dangerous remains funny throughout these moments, but the story suffers a little strain here by getting a bit off track. It also ditches its mockumentary style in the third act for a straightforward narrative, but you may not even notice.
Regardless, Time Travel is Dangerous feels very special. Its extraordinarily quirky ensemble of zany characters makes the town of Twin Peaks look normal by comparison, and its adjunct weirdness while operating in the mindset of “everything’s normal” helps the audience relate it to our reality, which is for sure bonkers as f*ck right now. My hats off to the writing crew (Shakespeare sisters Anna Elizabeth and Hillary, along with Reading and Syratt) for delivering more laughs than I had in just about any big-budget comedy released in 2024, and in under a hundred minutes, too!
Featuring the talents of Sophie Thompson, Johnny Vegas, Jane Horrocks, Tony Way, Mark Heap, Brian Bovell, and Stephen Fry, Time Travel is Dangerous is a fun little acid trip of a film that’s a wonderful excursion from the mainstream. The film is very heartfelt and community-forward and, despite all its nostalgia-leaning thematic material, is pretty bold in reminding us not to get caught up in the past.
Time Travel is Dangerous hits UK cinemas on 28 March.
No Title
Best friends Ruth and Megan run a vintage shop in North London. When they stumble across a time machine, they embark on trips to the past, ‘borrowing’ items to sell in the present. They don’t want to change history, or rob banks, they just want to find a nice lamp…
