Sightseers

Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, the authors and stars of this extremely British and extremely black comedy, pull off a major success with this slice of surrealistic social satire. By all rights this dark tale about a working-class couple that take a murderous caravanning holiday through the English countryside should fall completely off the rails at about the halfway point. However, under the confident direction of Ben Wheatley (Kill List), the film never dissolves into meaningless shock-for-shock’s-sake, and maintains its intriguing and insightful perspective even after it gives up on any pretense of realism.

In the way that Mike Leigh’s Nuts In May satirized 1970s middle class dreams of utopian societies (which only work if very few outsiders intrude on that utopia), Sightseers lampoons our current nihilistic age where individuals create their own morality and societal rules, rather than adhering to a democratically accepted social contract. The Brits have an illustrious history of comedic films about murder, and Sightseers is a very British film indeed, but it should strike a chord with any audience living in our highly polarized and culturally isolated world.