Following the success of his critically acclaimed horror Kill List, Ben Wheatley turns his hand to black comedy with Sightseers. A bizarre and occasionally gruesome serial killer road-trip movie, this low-budget, largely improvised film combines the double horror of unhinged personalities and the humble caravan holiday. Think Natural Born Killers meets Mike Leigh in the Cumberlands. That’s the theory, anyway.
Regular collaborators Alice Lowe and Steve Oram (Lifespam, Alan Partridge & Other Less Successful Characters) are Chris and Tina, an almost horrendously ordinary, English couple.
There’s an air of Bridget Jones about Tina, who still lives with her co-dependent mother and gets her kicks by knitting crotchless underwear. Meanwhile, fusty Chris is the type who grows actively excited at the thought of visiting Keswick Pencil Museum. From the offset, it seems lucky that these two non-sequitur-loving oddballs have found each other.
However, all is not as it seems. Sightseers soon takes some madcap twists during its tour of England’s most boring tourist attractions. As Chris is revealed to be a psychopathic killer and Tina a potpourri fetishising copycat, the actors share a weird, dark chemistry. Vicious murders are followed by bizarre defences, such as the theory that their random culling of the population reduces their victims’ carbon footprint, so “murder is green”.
The bleak, deadpan humour is echoed by drab visuals, making the first half a delightfully observed exercise in typically British absurdist humour.
As the murders and cramped caravan trysts begin to repeat themselves, Sightseers loses momentum, and its aim becomes unclear. It is not quite funny enough to be an outrageous comedy, insufficiently scary to be a horror or sharp enough to be a satire.
Sightseers may well come to be seen as the Pencil Museum of movies: a cute and diverting pit-stop for cult fans.