​Sightseers - Film Review by Izzy Seiveking

By 2010 onwards, a new tradition of black comedy had been established in British cinema. Edgar Wright's famed 'Cornetto Trilogy' (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End, 2004-2013) arguably started the trend, parodying a zombified British work force and public listlessness. At the same time, horror auteur Christopher Smith made the London Underground something to fear in Creep (2004) and team trips to be avoided with his gory follow up, Severance (2006), in which slacker employee Danny Dyer outsmarts vengeful poachers hunting down his co-workers in the Hungarian mountains. Even the hitmen-turned-tourists of Martin McDonagh's In Bruges (2008) are comic relief within the criminal underworld. Poking fun at corporate work culture and British mannerisms, these types of black comedies also paved the way for a second folk horror revival, and it was only a matter of time before superstition and grievances seeped out of the countryside and into familiar haunts. 

A stolen dog, unfortunately placed knitting needles and murder await us in the first of our horror film season, Ben Wheatley's third feature, Sightseers (2012). Although Wheatley debuted with the rat-in the-family crime Down Terrace in 2009, he's best known for the chilling war trauma/folk horror hybrid Kill List in 2011 and the experimental, 17th-century A Field in England in 2013. You'll find Irish master of fear Michael Smiley and Inside No.9's Reece Shearsmith in several of them, yet it would be a grave (as we'll learn in Sightseers) mistake to underestimate his female partners in crime, like wife Amy Jupe, who wrote Kill List and A Field in England (here, she edited). Going slightly off the beaten track, that minor ice-cream girl in Hot Fuzz and a British comedian were given greater creative reign in Sightseers, winning Best Screenplay at the British Independent Film Awards that year.

Less buddy film, more toxic relationship, writer and star Alice Lowe is Tina, half of the seemingly mediocre couple that fellow co-writer Steve Oram completes as boyfriend Steve. Sexually inhibited, emotionally detached and undermined by her needy mother Carol (Eileen Davies, who earnt a BIFA nomination for her unhealthy appetite for disaster), Steve has planned a road trip up North that Tina responds to with all the excitement of a teenage girl's first holiday away from her parents. Even before the chaos ensues, there's a knowingly British sense of humour in their expectations- the academic and fully kitted out Steve hoping to pen a caravanning book; keen knitter Tina fashioning herself risqué lingerie for a sex-filled getaway. Lowe even adopts a nervous lisp and nears wobbly meltdowns as Tina, making her endearingly juvenile and laughably pitiful. Oram, meanwhile, hardly disguises Steve's psychopathy and cunningness as he starts killing undesirable tourists- a sly caravan manoeuvre to get back at a litter bug; bludgeoning an environmentalist whom Tina maliciously accuses of rape. The matter-of-factness in which Tina and Steve justify their kills makes this particularly British horror not only palatable for the more squeamish, but effortlessly funny, too. Although it's Steve who kills first, Tina's lying is so outrageous, her behaviour so impulsive, that we never hold her to the same moral accountability. She's the ultimate anti-heroine.

On that note, there's something else here that is unsettling. Allowing himself to be kissed by a bride to-be in Tina's presence and urging her into committing a final act of love (for him, of course), Steve isn't a good egg even before the killing spree. Bloody as it might have been to get there, in the end Sightseers could be read as a feminist tale, albeit extreme. This nicely explains Lowe's 2016 horror Prevenge, where a pregnant woman commits bloody rampage because her foetus supposedly tells her to do so (admirably, Lowe wrote, directed and starred in this whilst pregnant herself. How's that for treating pregnant women as if they're incapacitated?). Revealing more about Steve's character is his instant dislike of couple Ian and Janice (Monica Dolan, another Black Mirror alumni). With a sparkling caravan and a pampered pet, they represent the most tediously entitled of holiday makers. In this way, Wheatley and his collaborators know exactly what kind of people we fantasize about bumping off and make it real in the bleak, British daylight. Much as one recoils at the gory spilled entrails left in their tracks, in the safe confines of black comedy we're free to laugh and even relate to it. As Johnathan Hatful explains, Wheatley " keeps coming back to very British nightmares" in his work, with an 'eviscerating take on social hierarchy and class structure" that has permeated his recent foray into science fiction, 2021's In the Earth and 2025's Bulk. Writing about British horror post 1970, James Rowe also notes the thematic 'perversions of rational normality' that emerged after the decline of Gothic horror, just when folk horror took off.

Cleverly, Sightseers also both fits into and eschews the traditional folk horror model of rural isolation. Wheatley's regular cinematographer Laurie Rose pays homage to the hand-held camera realism of independent horror cinema pre 2000s, especially the cramped space of Tina's bedroom and caravan interior. Sightseers revels in in both the mundane and beautiful, recalling Summerisle Island in Robin Hardy's 1973 classic The Wickerman whilst making car parks and motorways sinister, too. Where folk horror locations are usually vague, shooting in recognisable locations (i.e. Yorkshire's Ribbledale Viaduct) gives Sightseers a certain legitimacy. I like folk horror academic Howard David Ingham's interpretation of Wheatley's locations, their very banality inspiring " the strange, the prosaic and the uncanny... all espouse the business of death as [an] inescapable sacrament of a bleak paganism". In a reverse of how 2008's Eden Lake moved a gang of teenage killers into the woods, Sightseers places its folk horror antagonists in dull civilisation.

Our film programmer, Charlie, thought Sightseers would honour the Barn's rurality and our mix of cinematic tastes (comedy; himself and Luke, horror; yours truly). It's a more daring choice for us, less revered than our previous films, but sure to put you into Halloween mode and raise a laugh at our collective British psyche- murderous impulses aside.

References
Ingham, Howard. D, 2018. We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror. Room 207 Press. Hatful, Jonathan, 2025. ‘Inside the mind of Ben Wheatley’. Science + Media Museum. Rose, James, 2009. Beyond Hammer: British Horror Cinema since 1970. Liverpool University Press.