With the first part of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit just around the corner, it's perfect time for Ben Wheatley's Sightseers, which depicts a similarly idyllic pastoral Shire. Except this one is splashed in brains. A follow-up to the unrelentingly grim Kill List, Sightseers is another social-realist slant on an existing genre, this time the whimsical road movie.
PM David Cameron might want a British film industry that churns out pseudo-Hollywood blockbusters, but as a nation glamour isn't our creative currency - we're at our best when examining the inherent crapness of things. Even Bond has to slum it with a wireless these days.
Chris and Tina (played by comedians Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, who also wrote the film) are Bonnie and Clyde and Withnail and I, roaming the British countryside, visiting pencil museums and tram museums, violently murdering litterbugs and Daily Mail readers. It sounds dark and it is, but it's also very funny: each killing is relevant to the killer only the context of Chris and Tina's hermetically sealed relationship; any remorse is in the context of how upsets the other. Morality and legality don't get a glimpse.
So in a way it's a one-joke skit, but it's a joke with legs, leading the despicable duo across some stunning British locations, from suburbia to highland, via nightmarish montages, all to an unsettling soundtrack consisting of John Carpenter synth, '80s pop, and '60s psychedelic rock.
With Wheatley and Andrea Arnold, whose recent adaptation of Wuthering Heights was a brilliantly aimed punch to the ribs of the period drama, we have a duo of international-quality filmmakers following the lead of Shane Meadows in making intelligent and caustic underbelly films about Britain for Britons; a creative, anti-Establishment tradition that carries the baton of Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Alan Clarke, and which always seems most vital under a Tory government presiding over a recessive homeland.
PM David Cameron might want a British film industry that churns out pseudo-Hollywood blockbusters, but as a nation glamour isn't our creative currency - we're at our best when examining the inherent crapness of things. Even Bond has to slum it with a wireless these days.
Chris and Tina (played by comedians Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, who also wrote the film) are Bonnie and Clyde and Withnail and I, roaming the British countryside, visiting pencil museums and tram museums, violently murdering litterbugs and Daily Mail readers. It sounds dark and it is, but it's also very funny: each killing is relevant to the killer only the context of Chris and Tina's hermetically sealed relationship; any remorse is in the context of how upsets the other. Morality and legality don't get a glimpse.
So in a way it's a one-joke skit, but it's a joke with legs, leading the despicable duo across some stunning British locations, from suburbia to highland, via nightmarish montages, all to an unsettling soundtrack consisting of John Carpenter synth, '80s pop, and '60s psychedelic rock.
With Wheatley and Andrea Arnold, whose recent adaptation of Wuthering Heights was a brilliantly aimed punch to the ribs of the period drama, we have a duo of international-quality filmmakers following the lead of Shane Meadows in making intelligent and caustic underbelly films about Britain for Britons; a creative, anti-Establishment tradition that carries the baton of Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Alan Clarke, and which always seems most vital under a Tory government presiding over a recessive homeland.