Review of Sightseers (2012) by Mike T — 20 Sep 2012

That Tina's mother is both the most irritating and least evil character in Ben Wheatley's Sightseers speaks directly to the film's hilarious, black, sardonic core. Her mother is manipulative, mean, small minded and cruel, trying as best she can to prevent her daughter (played by Alice Lowe, who cowrote the script with her co-star) from leaving on a caravan holiday with her new boyfriend Chris (Steve Oram). She predicts all kinds of trouble and horror, she warns Tina that she won't be able to find the pasta sauce she likes, she calls her daughter names and predicts the direst of hilarious outcomes, she pretends to injure herself and demands help.

That she was right but couldn't even come close to the bloody catastrophic extent of her daughter's disastrous holiday is the bleak beating heart of a joke that centers Sightseers.

Tina and Chris do eventually escape Tina's mother, on their way to visit Pencil Museums, Tram Museums and caverns spread across the rural English countryside. It's an "erotic odyssey", and also an opportunity for Chris to work on his book, and occasionally indulge in his true passion, which is brutally, enthusiastically murdering people who have offended his sense of aesthetic propriety. Whether Tina finds this surprising or not is debatable, but once the die is cast in the form of a backed-over litterbug, she's soon doing what she can to pry her way into her beloved's persnickety world of murder, and the pair travel the countryside thrashing out their differences in the most bloody way imaginable.

Sightseers is, to too-enthusiastically jam an admittendly roundish peg into a round hole, a polite British version of God Bless America, the film that Bobcat Goldthwait brought to and sold at Midnight Madness last year. But where that film's visceral fuck-the-world bombast was a targeted at the perceived decline of the American empire, Sightseer's cross-country bloodiness is purely, naturalistically personal.

It's a warm, funny look at evil that's truly, actually banal, with two cracking performances from actors who effortlessly breath life into characters who are simultaneously incredibly ordinary people and depraved, psychotic murderers. It's gory and violent and enjoyably amoral, set in an allegorical space that lets truly mundane Pencil-Museum-enjoying people work out their interpersonal grudges with the blood of various hapless passers-by.

Wheatley fills the film (which is based on a play written by the two stars) with the same kind of dark, hinted-at pagan/occult Celtic menace that eventually helped transform his last film, Kill List, from a hitman-thriller into a disturbing piece of neotraditional British horror. Ley lines, witches and pagan sacrifices inhabit the margins of Sightseers, but what inhabits the center of the film is the black joke that is the quotidian bickering and holy terror of a couple of sweater-wearing psychos. Sightseers is small, personal and intimate, mixing moments tender recognizable intimacy with brutally funny excursions into spree murder. Wheatley as a director is working here for the first time from a script not his own, but his ability to spin traditional British social realist filmmaking with the spiky bits of genre convention is largely intact. The effect's an odd one, but thoroughly enjoyable.