REVIEW - SIGHTSEERS

Sightseers is all shock and no surprise. A low-budget, niche product, a British black comedy, with a target audience clearly in mind. What it could achieve were it to be unleashed on the mainstream. How little it provokes those among us who have seen it all before. Aside from its hackneyed social satire, the screenplay does provide leads Alice Lowe and Steve Oram (they co-wrote it) with some plum comedic moments, particularly when they refrain from stressing the point too markedly. Sightseers is funny when it doesn't try too hard, because there's nothing funny about trying too hard. In the directorial hands of Ben Wheatley, the violence is comically graphic, which is a trademark of his, and nothing more than an affectation. It achieves nothing, the glee with which he revels in the gore, the overcooked mood of discomfort like the cheapest, crassest horror movie. I'm hardly squeamish, but my guard is automatically raised when I see violence for violence's sake in a movie. Maybe had I connected more with Sightseers' sense of humour, I would have appreciated it, but therein lies the problem: I did connect with it, I did get it, I just didn't find it nearly as clever, funny, insightful or original as it seems to. Blood spurts from wounds like the lunacy spurts from the minds of these most insular folks - it's easy to forget that people like this (to an extent) do exist, even in a country such as the UK, where one is rarely far from urbanity and modernity. Wheatley may hammer the point across rather too brutally (as is his wont), but he is familiar with the deadening grey that permeates the sky and the air and the people of this country, and the culture. It's terrifically exploitative - could anyone from the Midlands ever not sound like a clueless bumpkin? It makes Sightseers quite a sad experience at times. These poor, neglected souls, both rejecting and rejected by a global society always in progression. All they want to do is go to the pencil museum.