Murder In Sight

Even as director Ben Wheatley turns from low-rent crime-movie (2009's Down Terrace) and horror (2011's Kill List) to comedy, the kills keep coming: Sightseers finding comics Steve Oram and Alice Lowe playing a pair of polar-fleece clad dimwits whose 'romantic' caravanning holiday gets a little murdery. “Just because you're making a comedy doesn't mean you can't have drama, and pathos, and darkness,” says the 40-year-old English filmmaker. “You just have to make sure that it's all designed, eventually, to come to a laugh.”

Wheatley had wanted to make a comedy when coming off Kill List, an artful study of wild cult ritual clearly influenced by the original The Wicker Man. Though genre nerds reacted to it gleefully, Wheatley enjoyed assembling it far less. “Kill List ended up being quite a depressing, difficult film to make,” he says. “The shoot was fun, but the editing of it turned up to be quite traumatising. I hadn't really thought what it would be like to patiently sit down and make something so horrible, a film that is explicitly designed to terrify people. I ended up, as I was watching it day after day in the edit suite, feeling quite guilty about it all. When you could make any kind of film, it feels like quite a strange thing to make a film that is going to make people upset. So, this time, I wanted to make something that could make people happy.”

And, so, Sightseers trails Oram and Lowe, listening in on their comic riffs, which come delivered in a droll Midlands deadpan. “It's about how relationships work in terms of dynamics; how people negotiate being together, how the balance of power works, and how sometimes that power goes back and forward,” Wheatley says; these powergames leading to numerous scenes in which their casual murdering comes as the result of emotional blackmail. The bloodied trail they leave – and the sense that these characters are out to kill anyone who could be perceived as their rivals – is, for Wheatley, a commentary on the ancient urges still bubbling in modern man.

“The characters aren't travelling across the landscape so much as they're travelling back through time,” Wheatley offers. “The places they visit are out-of-the-way, often industrial places; and there's this sense that they're moving further away from modern life, deeper into the past, until they're just a couple of people on the side of a mountain. They're almost like cavemen by the end of it. They're in touch with their more primal, more violent side, and they also create their own moral universe.

“Even though I wanted to make something different, there are ideas that are there in Down Terrace, Kill List, and Sightseers. People are modern people, but they're ancient people as well. As you get older, you see the history around you, and you realise that you're not in this completely unique moment. We're sold this reassuring idea that as you move into the future, things are getting better, but everything's just repeating. A lot of people have died for humanity to get to the point where you stand now, Twittering away. Wherever you are in England, you're never too far away from somewhere that a lot of blood has been spilt.”

WHAT: Sightseers
WHEN & WHERE: In cinemas December 26