Sightseers

This week I’ve been watching Sightseers

Catching Sightseers has been a long time coming. Since its release three years ago, my flatmate Dec and I have been planning to watch it, but due to work commitments we’ve only now found the time. (Life is busy. We both work part-time, pursuing solo projects: Dec as a classical guitarist; me as a comedian. Conceivably, this ‘gained time’ should be spent creating something that will one day get us listed in the Guardian Guide, instead it is spent in front of Netflix, drinking tea, questioning how that hack guitarist/comedian got a gig in that venue).

Sightseers is a film by Britain’s most daring filmmaker Ben Wheatley. Wheatley began his career on low-budget crime drama, Down Terrace. Shot in eight days on a measly budget, the film garnered praise for splicing splashy violence with side-splitting humour. For this, the term ‘Britain’s Tarintino’ was soon bandied about.

Ben Wheatley

His next film though put pay to the idea he was a Tarintino copyist, as Kill List owed more to Britain’s folk past than LA’s postmodernism. Its story of two retired contract killers returning for one last pay day has the creeping unease of a Hitchcock thriller and the pastoral unease of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Simply the film couldn’t have been made by an American, neither could his next, Sightseers.

While Wheatley wrote his first two films, Sightseers is penned by comedians Steve Oram and Alice Lowe. Oram and Lowe met on the character comedy scene, a double act soon emerged, which eventually led to them supporting Steve Coogan on tour. Whilst working together they conceived the idea of Sightseers; originally they thought it might work as a sketch or sitcom, but in researching the project they found there was enough material to make a film. It is easy to see why the project appealed to Wheatley; for the story has the self-same gore and comic uproar that typifies his own work.

Steve Oram and Alice Lowe

The story begins with Tina at home with her mum. The camera pans around the living room, showcasing the pairs love of dogs: framed pictures of hounds abound and diploma certificates celebrating Tina’s dog skills are rife. On top of this, Tina’s mum is a big fan of snow globes, an apt metaphor for the closeted life her and her daughter live. Chris, Tina’s boyfriend, is a threat to the hermetically sealed humdrum and sets about shaking it up by inviting Tina on a caravan trip. Naturally, Tina’s mum is indignant and does not want her daughter to go. Tina though has fallen for Chris and intends, with her woolen crotchless negligee, to turn the National Trust sojourn into a sex-filled odyssey.

The darkness at the heart of Chris’ nature though is revealed on the driveway when Tina’s mum brands him: ‘Murderer.’ Initially we think this is the senile cry of the jilted, but when Tina retorts: “It was an accident, Mum,” we’re not so sure. The two depart for their caravan holiday to the sound of Soft Cell’s, ‘Tainted Love’- a portent for things to come.

The first stop on their romantic break is the Tramway Museum. Together the two sit on one of the oldest trams in circulation; a careless man drops his litter on the floor, and despite Chris’ reminders to pick it up, he obstinately refuses. Chris, a seething beard of rage, cannot countenance how someone could do such a thing. But with Tina determined to have a good holiday, he ensures her he’ll forget it.

Chris is not a man who forgets.  

He is a man who has been slighted in life and won’t be slighted again. On leaving the Tramway Museum, Chris reverses into the litterbug, disposing his brains all over the car park. Naturally trusting, Tina believes it was an accident, worrying only whether it will “spoil their holiday.” However as Chris’s ‘accidents’ grow, Tina’s manipulation does too. When a rambler accuses her of dog fouling, she calls on Chris to administer rough justice. Hypocritically turning a blind eye to his girlfriend’s littering, Chris is more than happy to turn the air blue and the ground red. Over the course of the movie the pair become a two-person crime wave meting out justice to anyone who crosses them.

Tina and Chris

The fact that we laugh at Chris and Tina’s actions is a testament to Oram, Lowe and Wheatley. Having grisly murders take place in such innocuous settings is an inherently funny juxtaposition. Also, when the impish naivety is undermined by the snobbery of other holidaymakers, we want the Primark waterproofs to come out on top. What is really impressive is how the film evolves into a kind of psycho-sexual drama with the two’s justification for killing becoming less about self-empowerment and more about receiving validation from the other. Bizarrely, what starts as Mike Leigh’s Nuts In May turns into a comic re-imagining of Macbeth.

If you wanted further proof that Wheatley is a filmmaker with a future, his next film High Rise, an adaptation of a J.G. Ballard novel, stars big-hitters Tom Hiddlestone and Sienna Miller. Let’s hope now that Wheatley is working with A-listers on bigger budgets he doesn’t lose the idiosyncrasies that make his work vital and brilliant.