Sightseers

This is a film that would have totally passed me by were it not for the recommendation of my parents.  I know they read this blog (Hi guys) so I should be careful how I word this - but I'm sure I've suggested more good films to them in recent years than they have to me, so they owed me one.  With Sightseers they did a very good job.

Sightseers is a low budget British production in which a couple go off on a caravanning holiday around Britain, with what appears to be the intention of visiting a top 10 list of twee British tourist attractions.  One of these is the pencil factory in Cumbria - which I am lead to believe is in fact very interesting.  Tina and Chris have only recently met, and Tina's Mum is worried to the point of psychosis about her daughter going away with this strange man - though we get the strong impression she's just sorry for herself that she wont have anyone around to look after her for 2 weeks.  When Tina and Chris stop off at the National Tramway Museum and Chris is annoyed by a man dropping his ice cream wrapper on the floor of a tram, it seems like uncanny misfortune when later in the day the very same man is run over by Chris in a terrible accident.  Or is it an accident?

The film then ventures into some very dark comic territory, a world in which Chris is something of a mental case who tends to right society's wrongs with terminal force and - stranger still - Tina seems ok with it.  It's very funny stuff involving the theft of a dog, a cyclist with his own custom-build space tent, a bowl of pot-pourri, bad underpants, a bit of traditional British keeping up with the Joneses and a lot more besides.  The story takes something utterly mundane - a traditional British caravanning holiday - and turns it into the kind of psychotic rampage you might expect to be set in the great American plains involving hundreds of police cars and automatic weaponry.  Half the joke is in seeing this kind of film set in rural Britain for a change rather than the mean streets of Bogotá (or wherever).  In this sense it has something in common with Hot Fuzz as well as director Ben Wheatley's other recent film Kill List - both films that I enjoyed a lot.

In conclusions then, Sightseers is a very funny film which takes a lot of unexpected turns and will probably ruffle the feathers of anyone used to the traditional way in which stories like this are told.  Congratulations to the folks though, who came through with a win this time.