SIGHTSEERS (Ben Wheatley) Rating: NNNN
If you’ve seen the harrowing Kill List, which went straight to Netflix after playing 2011’s Toronto Film Festival, you’ll appreciate what a change of pace Sightseers is for director Ben Wheatley.
After Kill List’s dehumanizing descent into horror, Sightseers is a pitch-black farce about a couple of misfits (played by co-writers Alice Lowe and Steve Oram) whose caravan holiday goes very, very badly for almost everyone they meet.
It’s Badlands in the Midlands: Wheatley contrasts the everyday trials of a boring vacation (mismatched travelling companions, judgmental strangers, obnoxious bridal parties) with the more immediate and considerably more graphic retribution visited upon the offenders.
Lowe and Oram, who built the screenplay from characters they wrote for the stage years ago, deserve credit themselves for creating such fascinating people, and for giving them so many awful things to do.