Sightseers, 2012 - ★★★½

Sightseers, 2012 - ★★★½
REVIEWED

"I wouldnt shit on you Chris, not unless you asked me to"

Tina (Alice Lowe)

Right Tina our next stop is... Sightseers is a darkly humourous vacation nightmare. Anal retentive Chris takes his withdrawn mother fixated new girlfriend Tina, on a sightseeing camping trip of the great Northern English countryside. Only theres more under the surface of Chris & Tina's heady world of named caravans, quaint museums and sexy knitted underwear than first meets the eye.

Sightseers is one of those movies that succeeds in being both cringe inducingly bleak and hilarious in equal measures. Its sort of Natural Born Killers meets Carry on Camping, or National Lampoons European Vacation by way of Hammer. In fact outside of BBC's League of Gentlemen I've not seen rural comedy so dark, probably Klovn: The Movie would be closest recent film, thats similar.

"Hes not a person Tina, hes a daily mail reader."

Chris (Steve Oram)

Director Ben Wheatley does a fine job of capturing the mundane world of camping, even managing to throw in some lovely footage of the countryside. The central performances from Steve Oram as Chris and Alice Lowe as Tina are spot on (they also both threw their own material into the mix). Likewise Amy Jump's script, is briming with subtle and not so subtle satire. Highlight for me was the few times Tina came out of her shell, from being a timid knitting & dog loving home girl to being full on smut, with foul mouth rants about using shit for lipstick.... Ohh and that ending was standing ovation worthy, everyone loves an happy ending, right!.

[PRFR: Personal Reasons For Remembering]
Reminded me how fucking dull British caravaning holidays are, use of our national hymn Jerusalem and the ending.

Originally taken from Letterboxd