Sightseers review

Chris: hes not a person Tina, he’s a Daily Mail reader

Director: Ben Wheatley
(2012)

I honestly can’t explain why I was drawn to go and spend my hard earned cash on Ben Wheatley’s latest film Sightseers. My only other experience with the up and coming director was 2011’s hitman horror Kill List, a film I found to be a frustrating effort. At its best it was a tense, exhilarating affair. Yet at its worst, it gave the viewer little information to draw conclusions from, resulting in a maddening ending. Yet Sightseers is a different type of film, hell, it’s a completely different genre; a welcome change that has done Wheatley well, as Sightseers is a funny, entertaining film.

Sightseers focuses on Alice (Tina Lowe) an eccentric woman who lives with her obsessive, controlling mother Carol (Eileen Davies). Things begin to look up for her when she meets Chris (Steve Oram), a ginger faced oddball who we can assess to being Tina's escape from her domineering mother. Despite Carol’s objections, she joins Chris on a caravan holiday to Yorkshire, where the wonders of the Crich Tramway museum awaits. Already it’s clear that Tina isn’t embarking on a regular holiday as soon Chris’ dark secrets begin to spill out.

While Sightseers is a comedy, it is decidedly different from the usual affairs that we’ve been treated to in 2012. The humorous aspect of the feature plays second fiddle for the majority of the film, with the duo’s banal lives taking the forefront. The planned trips to an aqueduct and a pencil museum paints () as the most mundane man in Britain, but this merely acts as juxtaposition to the fact he is a vicious serial killer. Doing as little as littering on a tram is enough to set him off, swiftly dealing with the perpetrator by ploughing him down with a caravan. Once we witness Chris commit his first murder, his boring lifestyle is perceived in a far more sinister light, transitioning from strange to utterly terrifying.

Yet the film never gets bogged down by its unsettling atmosphere thanks to jokes that possess a constant rhythm in there timing. From the stupid (a hiker demands Tina cleans up her dogs mess as she protests wide eyed innocence that “I didn’t do that”) to the sinister (sodomizing the corpse of a daily mail reader to throw the authorities off Chris’ tail). The humour is consistently funny, but usually not beyond the level of chuckling. No joke ever goes wasted, yet none ever reach side splitting heights either; it’s both a blessing and a curse.

The murders themselves are usually excellent thanks to the sublime editing that crosscuts between multiple strands of story, culminating in an intense payoff. Wheatley uses this technique on more that one occasion, but doesn’t over saturate it to the point of it losing its effectiveness. Once Tina catches on to Chris’ lust for murder she doesn’t try to escape of leave him, instead she accepts him for who he is, her loneliness is captured expertly through solid writing and Lowe’s kooky performance. Soon she starts killing as well, much to his dismay due to the lack of motive and technique. The ending is typical Wheatley, jarring and abrupt, there’s no doubt that audiences may find the ride they've been enjoying so thoroughly comes to a screeching, unsatisfying halt. There's method in the madness, but this doesn't allow for any initial satisfaction in said conclusion.

Ben Wheatleys style of filmmaking is one that fans must surely love, little and often. Much like Kill List, sightseers is only an hour and a half long, but this allows for a terrific output rate. Sightseers might not be an incredible film, but it’s certainly sending Wheatleys career in the right direction.

7