Exploring the shocking ending of Ben Wheatley’s ‘Sightseers’
Amongst Ben Wheatley’s greatest films are the 2011 modern pagan horror film Kill List, 2013’s psychedelic historical trip A Field in England, and sandwiched comfortably between them is 2012’s Sightseers. The early work of Wheatley is largely comprised of placing ordinary English people in extraordinary and often horrific scenarios, and those three films perfectly exemplify such a trope.
A Field in England was an admittedly difficult watch, but that was largely owing to the fact that it seemed to replicate a mushroom trip. Kill List was exciting throughout as we slowly watched an ordinary action kill descend into pagan sacrificial madness. When it came to Sightseers, though, there was a real element of comedy present, but the biggest effect this had was that it made the ending all the more shocking.
The film was its star actors Alice Lowe, known for her role as Madeleine Wool/Liz Asher in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, and Steve Oram, with Wheatley’s wife and frequently artistic collaborator Amy Jump providing additional material. It simply tells of two social outcasts, Chris and Tina, who embark on a trip around the Midlands countryside, but allow their holiday to become a killing spree.
Chris is highly enthusiastic about getting away for a few days with his new girlfriend, who is harbouring trauma from accidentally killing her mother’s dog Poppy and suffering her ensuing wrath. At the National Tramway Museum, we are surprised to find that what we might have thought would be a tender film turns very violent indeed when Chris murders a litterer out of nowhere, setting a precedent for the remainder of the movie.
Tina soon joins in on the murders with Chris and a relationship founded on freedom from the moral expectations of society blooms. Here, it is Tina and Chris’ love that is the most important thing. They kill several other innocent citizens, including a gobby bride-to-be on a hen night and an outdoor living inventor and entrepreneur.
Things come to a head, though, when Tina finds a picture of herself with Chris standing atop the Ribblehead Viaduct, the final stop on their journey. They frequently fight throughout the movie, often for the choice that the other makes over deciding to kill someone, but their innate love for one another always resolves their issues, and they usually make up by having sex.
But the ending of the film is one of true shock, and the drawing in Chris’ notebook makes all the more sense. The couple stand atop the viaduct hand in hand, look down, and Chris asks Tina if she wants to “do it”. She gives him the affirmative, and Chris counts down and jumps. However, at the last minute, Tina lets go of Chris’ hand, and he falls to his death alone. The screen cuts to black. It’s one of the best and most harrowing endings in recent memory.
The beauty of it, though, is that one doesn’t really see it coming. Both Chris and Tina are running from their mental health issues: Tina’s trauma and sad relationship with her mother and Chris’ mundane week-to-week life and his locked-up emotions. “Everyone else seems to find it so easy to express themselves,” Chris laments to Tina. “I mean, even you’ve got your knitting”. They’re, of course, running from the law too. It’s just how deadpan the film is that makes the ending so great too. Chris and Tina are seemingly above normal human morality, and we find their acts, well, funny, despite their depravity.
The couple used murder as a way to escape their troubles. And it’s true that Tina essentially committed the final murder in the film, that of Chris. Like any great film, Sightseers poses questions to the audience that is left to them to answer. Was Chris a murderer all along? Was Tina? Did Tina begin to regret her actions and want to atone for them? The film’s ending is a stroke of genius and will long serve in the memory. It shows that, sometimes, even true love isn’t strong enough to commit the biggest human act imaginable.
