Sightseers
Ben Wheatley (2012)
Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, who wrote and play the leads in Sightseers, have some very good ideas for a lethal black comedy. Ben Wheatley’s misanthropy and appetite for thwacking, gory violence makes the film less interesting than it should be. This is Wheatley’s second film in succession about serial killings. The death-dealers in Kill List were professional hitmen. Here they’re Chris and Tina, a thirty-something couple from the Midlands, on a week’s caravan holiday and taking in tourist attractions as they head north. From the word go, Chris is quietly but firmly autocratic, Tina eccentrically infantile and obedient. The balance of power inevitably calls to mind Keith and Candice Marie in Nuts in May. The main supporting role – Martin, the affable inventor of an environmentally friendly but practically hopeless ‘carapod’, whom Chris and Tina meet on one of the caravan sites – isn’t a million miles away from the chubby PE teacher in Mike Leigh’s TV film. (In Sightseers, however, it’s the woman who gets jealous of the growing friendship between the two men.) Not the least effective part of Nuts in May is when the pompously reasonable Keith gets so mad that he’s ready to do violence to another camper. At the Crich Tram Museum, the first port of call in Sightseers, Chris is infuriated by a fellow passenger who drops an ice-cream wrapper on the floor of a vintage tram and, when Chris points this out, gives him the finger. A few screen moments later the lout lies dead, under the wheels of Chris’s caravan. It seems to be an accident – Chris appears to be upset. But when, later that day, he and Tina meet two new arrivals at the caravan park – a prick of a published writer (Chris is a would-be writer) and his sniffily PC wife – Chris’s looks could kill. First thing next morning, when the husband is in the hills walking his dog and checking out ley lines (the subject of his books), Chris translates those looks into brutal action.
Sightseers would be better if Chris, who claims he’s on ‘a sabbatical’ but is unemployed, having recently lost his job, weren’t so quickly revealed as homicidal and seriously screwed up. Once he has been, the audience is anticipating the next slaying and Ben Wheatley puts pressure on himself to top the previous one. It’s a challenge he probably relishes but the effect is reductive. Soon each tourist attraction becomes a horror film set; outdoors, the bad weather gets worse and the vast grey skies are suffused with oppressive, existential gloom. When Tina visits the Keswick Pencil Museum alone, the camera fixes on the faces of other, elderly visitors, making them look grotesque, vacant and vaguely sinister. Except for the inane remarks in regular supply, there’s nothing tame or mousy for the violence in Sightseers to contradict. There also should have been one or two surprises among the victims: we need someone who seems doomed the moment they appear or speak to extricate themselves; or someone to whom Chris initially takes a shine to say the wrong thing and pay for it with their life. Even so, Oram and Lowe’s script is better than Wheatley’s direction allows it to be. Most of the murderees are loathsome and enraging – you too would like to kill them. If Ben Wheatley cut away from or de-emphasised the acts of violence he would exploit our potential complicity with Chris. But the force and bloody detail of the attacks are not only horrifying (even if you look away, as I had to after the first two) but alienating – Wheatley puts a lot of distance between us and Chris. The gruesomeness doesn’t make sense to me: it doesn’t function as a reminder that this is all really happening since the plotting isn’t, and isn’t meant to be, realistic. The graphic mayhem consigns the story to a world apart, to a movie-genre universe.
The film rallies when tensions develop between the couple – when Tina joins in the killing both to impress Chris and because she’s jealous of the bride at a hen party, who flirts with him there. For his part, Chris is as piqued by Tina’s stealing his thunder as he’s shocked by her behaviour. Yet when she sends Martin, asleep in his ill-fated carapod, hurtling down a mountainside to his death, you sympathise with Chris’s alarm that things are getting out of control in a new and, to Chris, more alarming way. The friendship between him and Martin, who’s well played by Richard Glover, is nicely ambiguous. There are some good one-liners at this stage and you start to get a sense of how miserable, as well as how psychopathic, Chris is. He and Tina are preferable to most of their victims and to Tina’s possessive, malingering mother (Eileen Davies), and Steve Oram and Alice Lowe are both very good (he especially). But the pair are shut off in their anti-social weirdness. Chris is a fraud: he writes a lot less than he talks about writing – late on in the trip, Tina discovers a manuscript which consists of a few doodles. Her love of dogs is more pathological than humanising; Tina is determined that the (delightful) wire-haired terrier the couple appropriate after Chris has dispatched the ley lines man is a reincarnation of her mother’s dog, which died in an accident involving Tina’s knitting needles. At the end of a memorable week’s holiday, Chris and Tina prepare to die together by jumping off a cliff. As he jumps, she steps back: this may be no more than a sting-in-the-tail flourish but there’s a slight implication that Tina’s brainlessness is what enables her to survive – survive longer, at any rate, than the succession of people whose heads have been shattered in the course of Sightseers. The music played over the closing credits is ‘The Power of Love’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Monica Dolan makes a brief but, as usual, remarkable appearance as the soon-to-be-widowed other half of the prattish author (Jonathan Aris).
11 December 2012