Sightseers

Synopsis: Tina (Alice Lowe) is a shy and simple 34 year old living in the north of England. Sharing a home with her mother Carol (Eileen Davies) is a chore, not least because “Mam” is still grieving over the death of their pet terrier Poppy a year earlier in a freak knitting needle accident. Tina and her new boyfriend, Chris (Steve Oram), leave for a holiday, but things start to go awry at the first stop when Chris, upset about a litterbug, accidentally backs the caravan into the miscreant. Tina slowly comes to the realisation that her new beau may have serious anger management issues.

The English Lake District is one of the most spectacular sight-seeing areas in the world and cinematographer Laurie Rose does a fine job of bringing the beauty of this place to the screen, in both day and night scenes. What is less than attractive is the behaviour of Chris, who drives his Volvo out of Mam’s drive onto a trip of not-so-accidental-accidents and general misanthropy.

Ben Wheatley’s well-crafted tale of eccentricity gone wrong begins with a wailing sound which turns out to be Mam, an appalling attention-seeking type played with relish by Eileen Davies. In a perfect demonstration that you can show what people’s intents are without a word being said, Mam’s wailing is heard over a close-up of a pin-board map, where Chris is carefully winding wool around pins, which have been placed on the places he has determined that he and Tina will visit. These sights include tram car and pencil museums. Yes, on one level at least this is the ultimate daggy holiday with Lowe and Oram, who wrote the script with additional material by editor Amy Jump, playing perfectly an odd-couple pair of dags.

To start off with a squished pedestrian is a pretty dark way to start a comedy but the film gets darker as lives are put at serious risk, including, eventually, Tina’s. Yet whilst Sightseers has at its heart misanthropy, the filmmakers also clearly regard their characters with great affection. The clever thing about it is the way it sucks you into a micro-world of angry small-mindedness.  

In this respect the film is reminiscent of Fawlty Towers.  Here, however, unlike Basil Fawlty, Chris actually does something about the people he is genuinely angry with, including pretentious ramblers and owners of expensive caravans. There are delightful touches everywhere that endear us to the best of British but also on display is its beastliness, particularly its loathing of those not of one’s own ilk.

This conflict makes Sightseers not only engrossing, but a little unnerving and it will certainly make any middle level manager wary of sacking an employee for presenting a poor five year plan.

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