Is ‘Sightseers’ the greatest depiction of the wonderfully weird English countryside?
While England is undoubtedly the target of criticism when it comes to the many facets of its cultural offerings – say cuisine, for example – there’s no denying that the country provides some truly breathtaking natural scenery. It’s equally valid that English people possess offbeat humour and sometimes outright weirdness. In very few movies is this combination as succinctly married as in Ben Wheatley’s 2012 black comedy Sightseers.
Sightseers focuses on the journey of an admittedly odd couple, Chris and Tina, played by Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, respectively, as they take a short holiday through the English countryside in a caravan. However, there’s a darkness to the pair that leads them to commit a series of violent murders, taking their inner turmoil out on a handful of unsuspecting victims.
Visiting the minutiae of tourist attractions across the greenery of England, the relationship between Tina and Chris simmers from lustful energy to an unspoken misunderstanding of one another. Their fateful journey ultimately leads to tragedy, and the end of Sightseers is perhaps one of the most shocking and eternally memorable in recent cinema history.
Throughout the film, Wheatley details the stranger side of life in rural England, beginning with the rather uncomfortable relationship between its protagonists. Weirdness drips throughout the runtime of Sightseers, whether it be in the sickening nostalgia of Tina’s needy mother or in the violent banality of Chris’ immoral actions, then made all the more bizarre by the pair’s aggressive lovemaking.
That kind of black humour could be said to be representative of rural England as a whole, where people are known to not take themselves too seriously in the open air, free from the anxious lights of the city. Wheatley litters his film with several bizarre characters, too, which serves as a celebration of the strangeness of the countryside, most notably a happy-go-lucky inventing hippie who falls victim to Chris and Tina’s murderous rampage.
Interactions of this sort are encased in the mundanity that is often only experienced in the confines of a holiday home, campsite or caravan park, where the weather is often the most frequent topic of conversation. However, by having his protagonists kill such people yearning for that kind of talk, Wheatley casts a wry grin on them by having them murdered in the most brutal of ways.
Across rambling walks and in pencil museums, Sightseers is imbued with a surreal charm and Tina and Chris’ characters are both about as eccentric as they come. The English countryside itself is depicted as both beautiful and fear-inducing, perhaps with Wheatley playing into the quality of the sublime that the Romantic poets had written off so frequently so many centuries before the film was released.
In addition, Wheatley makes it his mission to touch on issues of class and social conformity without taking away from the humorous nature of the film. Chris justifies one of his acts of murder just because his victim is a Daily Mail reader, which, in retrospect, seems like fair reasoning. Chris and Tina journey through the most peculiar parts of the country in search of rebellion against their societal expectations, but they find that they are invariably part of it despite their barbaric behaviour.
Sightseers is a brilliant film that provides an ingenious comic glance at the banality and weirdness of the English countryside while also investigating the motivation for romantic and sexual love. In crafting a world where the incredibly ordinary can become extraordinary, Wheatley simultaneously delivers a celebration of rural England whilst chopping it up into reviled pieces.
Check out the trailer for the film below.
