How do you follow up last year’s gut punch that was Kill List? The answer is simply with the macabre, often extremely funny Sightseers. Director Ben Wheatley continues to prove himself one of the most attention-grabbing, important talents working in the British film industry today with his third film, smashing together the everyday with the outlandish, exquisitely mixing comedy and tragedy to make for a uniquely gripping experience.
The film follows Tina (Alice Lowe) and Chris (Steve Oram), a couple who decide to go on a caravan holiday despite the reservations of Tina’s elderly mother. At first intent on sticking to a strict schedule of visiting tram museums and pencil factories, things soon take a sinister turn when Chris starts acting on his primal criminal instincts.
The film is almost like an anthology of sorts made up of fascinating little stories every time the couple make a stop, each of them piling on top of one another as they increase in extremity. It’s horrifyingly realistic and impossible to take your eyes off, and though it might be quite as outright shocking or as explicitly violent as Wheatley’s previous work Kill List (that would be a tough thing to achieve), it still isn’t light on those qualities.
While sharing a lot of the same characteristics as Kill List and Wheatley’s under-seen debut Down Terrace, Sightseers is its own brand of crazy and increases the level of humour which beautifully offsets the brutality that punctuates the film. Wheatley employs a striking visual style – such as periodic use of slow-motion to heighten the shocking events – and brilliantly utilizes music that wouldn’t expect to hear; Soft Cell’s Tainted Love has rarely been used to better effect.
As strange as it may be to say this is actually a love story. A twisted love story but a love story nonetheless, filled with well-observed little moments that have the ring of truth. In spite of its more disquieting moments it is injected with a large dose of heart, quaint normalcy at times and real all-or-nothing performances from the two leads Lowe and Oram, who also wrote the screenplay together.
What makes the film so effective is that it’s uncomfortably believable; you really do feel like these could be real people roaming the English countryside and visiting tourist attractions. They are strangely compelling anti-heroes who Wheatley quite masterfully makes us care about in spite of their murderous actions. Ending on a grotesque but fitting punchline to a very dark joke, Sightseers is frequently unsettling but never short of entertaining.
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