Matthew Turner | On 30, Dec 2021

Director: Julian Fellowes
Cast: Maggie Smith, Alex Etel, Dominic West, Timothy Spall, Carice van Houten, Eliza Bennett, Hugh Bonneville, Harriet Walter, Pauline Collins, Kwayedza Kureya, Douglas Booth, Elisabeth Dermot Walsh
Certificate: PG

Has Boss Level whetted your appetite for more time travel titilation? Transport yourself no further than Time Travel Thursday, our column devoted to time travel movies. It’s on Thursday.

Based on Lucy M Boston’s 1954 children’s novel, The Chimneys of Green Knowe, this 2009 British drama is directed by Julian Fellowes, who would go on to create Downton Abbey the following year. That in itself lends the film a certain curiosity value, not least because it features not one but three future Downton cast members and shares similar settings, if not quite similar time periods.

Set primarily in 1944, the plot sees 13-year-old Manchester kid Tolly (Alex Etel) relocated to Green Knowe, the large country estate of his grandmother, Mrs Oldknow (Maggie Smith), while his mother (Elisabeth Dermot Walsh) stays in London, awaiting news of his father, who has gone missing overseas. Encouraged by his grandmother’s stories of the house and its history, Tolly discovers he can magically travel between 1944 and 1810, where he befriends kind, blind daughter Susan (Eliza Hope Bennett) and her former slave companion, Jacob (Kwayedza Kureya), who was rescued by Susan’s father, Captain Thomas Oldknow (Hugh Bonneville), on a trip to America.

As Tolly finds himself drawn to the past, he becomes embroiled in various adventures, most of which involve the dastardly machinations of evil butler Caxton (Dominic West), in yet more shades of Downton Abbey. Meanwhile, in the present day, Mrs Oldknow faces having to sell the family home unless some sort of money-based miracle occurs.  

As time travel movies go, From Time to Time is frequently frustrating, because it never bothers to establish or clarify its own rules. Strictly speaking, it’s really more of an astral projection movie, because Tolly doesn’t have physical presence (ie. people keep walking through him) in 1810, although objects he brings with him, like a torch, can be picked up by 1810 characters, for reasons that go unexplained.

On a similar note, only certain people are able to see – or sense, in Susan’s case – and hear Tolly in 1810, so it’s much more of a ghost story than a time travel movie. That said, there are definite time travel sequences, with sudden changes in lighting and season used to indicate the transitions between periods.

As befits a children’s book, the story is very by-the-numbers, offering a straightforward tale of tolerance and kindness, set against the general toxicity of Paxton, privileged son Sefton (Douglas Booth) and, initially at least, Susan’s mother Maria (Carice van Houten). To that end, the storytelling is often very frustrating – there are opportunities to do something interesting with the time travel aspect, but they’re frequently fumbled.

One key sequence illustrates the film’s maddening lack of clarity. At one point, Tolly brings a torch to the past, uses it to help someone and leaves it there. It then turns out that a now-hundred-year-old torch has always been on display in the family cabinet, suggesting that Tolly is simply fulfilling his pre-ordained destiny and that things had always happened that way. However, the film steers well clear of those ideas, preferring to wave them away with a knowing twinkle in the eye of either Maggie Smith or Pauline Collins (as housekeeper Mrs Tweedie).

It’s also an issue that there’s never any ostensible trigger for the time travel moments – they just seem to happen randomly, with Tolly seemingly not even curious about whether or not he can make it happen himself, or whether it’s to do with certain areas in the house.

In fairness, although the film frequently feels underdeveloped – there’s next to no actual story in the 1944 sequences, for example – it does at least deliver an exciting fire-based climax and the excellent cast ensure that it remains entirely watchable throughout.

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