Chris wants to show girlfriend Tina his world, but events soon conspire against the couple and their dream caravan holiday takes a very wrong turn.
At first Father Ted cute, but then League Of Gentlemen cruel - a combination that Wheatley never lets curdle - this is a dark little delight.
Inevitably, it loses momentum as the premise runs its course but for a good part of the journey this road movie offers disturbingly good fun.
Sightseers may not be a perfect work, but it remains a sight worth seeing.
Sightseers delivers tar-black comedy and a good deal of gruesomeness in spades.
Wheatley cannily wraps things up in an appropriately ghoulish but oddly poignant way before the film has a chance to outstay its welcome.
Comedies don't come much darker than this chillingly distinctive caravan caper.
What keeps it alive is that super dialogue, and the performances: Lowe, especially, finds a mopey monotone for Tina that drones away and just gets funnier.
It's a bit of a one-joke film and not quite funny enough but certainly original.
This latest isn't as funny as his brilliant debut Down Terrace or as disturbing as his occult thriller, Kill List, but it features many of his signature touches and sets him apart as a film-maker of exceptional talent and daring.
A uniquely British blend of excruciating comedy of embarrassment and outright grue, not quite as disorientating in its mood shifts as Kill List but just as impressive a film. Whether it ruins Crich Tramway Museum for you or prompts you to recreate Chris and Tina’s pilgrimage to the Ribblehead Viaduct, Wheatley’s film serves as a black-comic state-of-the-nation address.
The range of comedy turns Sightseers into a kind of screwball horror, with whiffs of stranger danger found in The League of Gentlemen to absurdist jibes about the upper-classes recalling a hugely distinct Python tone.
The juxtaposition of the anti-heroes' cosy ordinariness and their tendency to bash strangers over the head with a rock can be very funny at times, so Sightseers should be Wheatley's most commercially successful release. But it's also his weakest.
The movie mocks the sterile horror of the heritage industry, the hideous campsites the couple stop at and the blight they inflict on the beauty of the English landscape. The comic death trip Tina and Chris make thus becomes a lament for a lost Britain as cold and withering as anything Alan Bennett has given us, and weirdly moving.
A pitch-black anti-rom-com that doesn’t quite come off.
Ben Wheatley: Let England quake
Alice Lowe and Steve Oram on Sightseers
Not such a green and pleasant land after all.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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