12) Sightseers
When we start watching this dark comedy – written by its two leads, Alice Lowe and Steve Oram – we’re watching a slow-burn psycho-drama. Child-like Tina is excited to be leaving her over-bearing, passive-aggressive, demanding mother for a week, as her new boyfriend, Chris, takes her caravanning round the sights of rural England. Chris is a caravanning expert who is writing a book, and is excited to broaden the horizons of his compliant, doe-eyed lover.
Stopping first at a tramway museum, however, Chris begins to reveal a disturbing edge to his amiable personality, as he confronts a persistent litter bug. When he eventually kills him with his caravan in the car park, we feel as though we have the measure of this film, and expect to watch an impressionable young woman slowly realise that she is, in fact, on a road trip with a serial killer. Nothing could be further from the truth in terms of what this film has in store, though.
Killing another man in short order, Chris quickly confesses his crimes to Tina, and kills another man in front of her. Though she appears to be disturbed, she doesn’t spend a vast amount of time questioning his actions, and instead, they continue on their holiday – giving us the impression that Tina is compliant due to the trauma of what she has witnessed. Stopping at a restaurant for a romantic meal, the couple find themselves sharing the eatery with a bachelorette party, who become louder and more obnoxious as the evening draws on. Returning from the bathroom, Tina finds the bride-to-be locked in a passionate embrace with Chris, as a party dare.
As the audience, we imagine that Tina is now processing this into the same part of her traumatised mind as the discovery that she is trapped on the road with a killer, and the image of him bludgeoning a man to death. On the contrary, however, the film spins on its axis and follows her outside as she follows the bride-to-be. Deeply offended by her behaviour, Tina shoves the betrothed woman over a set of railings and down a sheer drop – cracking open her skull, like a watermelon.
From this point on, we see Tina fully embrace their joint status as serial killers, to the extent that she terrifies Chris – the man we thought was the scary character in the first place. That single scene flips their perceived dynamic entirely, as she begins to reveal herself to be more of a monster than he is. The joy of this brilliant film thereafter comes from his gradual realisation that he is out of depth in a situation where he assumed he would be calling all the shots. The arrogance that he displayed at the beginning of the film is slowly chipped away as he comes to accept that, while he may be the caravanning expert, he is now just a passenger on this dark and unnerving sightseeing trip.
