Sightseers: Movie Review

Sightseers: Movie Review

Cast: Alice Lowe, Steve Oram
Director: Ben Wheatley

Sightseers is the best black comedy you will see this year.

As an ex-pat Midlander who's been forced to endure some caravan holidays, I can perfectly attest to what Ben Wheatley's brought to this killer film.

Steve Oram and Alice Lowe play Chris and Tina, a pair of recent lovers who decide to escape Tina's stifling mother by heading away on a caravanning trip around the Yorkshire dales in the UK. But Chris is a veritable powder keg of anger, waiting to boil over...and as the mundane turns to murderous, the very dark humour is ratcheted up to 11.

The thing is combined with Tina's slightly creepy attitude (scarred after her mum's dog died in a knitting needle accident that she caused) and Chris's bristling ginger beard of pure rage, SightSeers manages to be a spectacle which heartily amuses and equally horrifies.

A radical dosage of ultra violence complements (and yet never overshadows) this apparently occasionally improvised mix; throw in some great banter (one scene sees Tina's mum shouting that her daughter was an accident) as well as a whole heap of phrases which are destined to become quotable (brown lipstick anyone?) and this is the perfect concoction of horror and humour.

But what Wheatley's also managed to capture is the various personalities who inhabit caravan holidays - be they the annoying pedants, noisy neighbours or new age nutjobs, it's a perfect dichotomy of lives lived in middle England.

Replete with great shots of the countryside and a cup so filled with black darkness that it runneth over, Sightseers is to be wholeheartedly recommended if you've got a slightly warped view of life.

Rating: