Review #605: 'Sightseers' (2012)

Many of my fondest childhood experiences are from my holidays and days out to the more scenic side of Britain; those small, rural villages and towns that seem to have the one (rather dull, looking back on it) tourist attraction. Sightseers spends its time around these places, with its lead character Chris (Steve Oram), a caravan enthusiast, a frequenter of such oddities as the Pencil Museum, the National Tramway Museum, and Mother Shipton's Cave. The film, directed by British up-and-comer Ben Wheatley (director of one of 2011's best films, Kill List), explores the hidden, underlying eeriness of these places, with their serenity a mask for small-town hokum and empty tedium. It's a little bit like The League of Gentleman, which poked fun at isolated yokels to create something really rather sinister amongst the hilarity. Only Sightseers is much crueller, gruesome and certainly less funny.

Tina (Alice Lowe), is a rather strange woman who lives with her mother Carol (Eileen Davies). Their relationship is strained due to the accidental death of their dog, who died in ridiculous circumstances. Her new boyfriend Chris, a ginger-faced eccentric, is taking her off in his caravan for a holiday around the Black Country, where they will see the sights and tourists hotspots, as well as getting in as much sex as possible. At the National Tramway Museum, Chris becomes increasingly angry at a careless visitor that keeps dropping litter wherever he goes, regardless of Chris's pleading. The man is 'accidentally' crushed beneath the wheel of Chris's caravan, which inadvertently awakens something inside of the previously meek Tina. The further their holiday goes on, the more corpses pile up, until Tina's unquenchable thirst for murder becomes a bit too much for the more casual serial killing Chris.

In the same vein as Kill List, Sightseers manages to mix sensational and outrageous fantasy with realistic, familiar environments. While Kill List turned suburbia into a skull-crushing hell-on-Earth, Sightseers explores the almost paganistic, lush yet wet countryside of the Lake District, and turns it into something more haunting and unsettling. Tina and Chris (played with alarming naturalism by scriptwriters Lowe and Oram) are strange creatures, both seemingly undeterred and almost inspired by their simplicity. Chris takes absolute delight in bludgeoning his victims, like a victim paying back a bully, righting all the little things that piss him off - people being loud in a restaurant, middle-class attitudes, simple rudeness. But he's also a very bitter character, angered by a man he meets in the caravan park that has a nicer caravan and is a successful writer. Chris has taken a 'sabbatical' to focus on his writing, only he's not a writer, he's a serial killer.

Tina is something else entirely, and is one of the film's saving graces. Both timid and naive, yet bubbling with the temperament of a spoilt little girl, she is the product of shying away from growing up in society, living with her demented mother and spending her time knitting in her bedroom that looks the same as it would have while she was growing up. The caravan trip is one almighty sexual and psychological release from her dull life, even knitting lingerie for her to wear for Chris. As the bodies pile up, she becomes increasingly out of control, becoming jealous over a fellow caravan enthusiast that Chris befriends and trying to set him up to be taken out of the picture. Lowe's performance is quite remarkable, bringing a improvisational naturalism to such a melting pot of a character.

But it's the sense of cruelty that blocks Sightseers from being the hoot it maybe should have been, peppered throughout with scenes of extreme violence, including a man's head half-squashed beneath the wheel of Chris's caravan. Yet while Kill List's violence was undeniably shocking, it served a purpose to the underlying sense of horror amidst its ugly subject matter. Here, it's not particularly clever or funny, nor does it seem to serve any big purpose, it's just nasty. Wheatley (with Lowe and Oram) seem to truly loath these characters, mocking the many stock types that appear throughout the film that serve no purpose other than to meet a gruesome end. Ultimately, Sightseers is certainly worth a look for its macabre mood, fine acting, and the locations (for those who grew up in the UK), but says nothing profound and isn't as funny as it really should be.


Directed by: Ben Wheatley
Starring: Alice Lowe, Steve Oram, Eileen Davies
Country: UK

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie