Sometimes it takes a while to get behind a director’s work, and to look past the subject matter for the vision embedded within, guiding each story frame by frame. And the other times, it takes exactly 95 minutes, which is how long Ben Wheatley’s Kill List took to sell me completely on whatever Wheatley had to offer. And then Down Terrace and his work in BBC television made their way to my eyes, and I hope this guy has one of the longest careers in history. Perhaps this story should have come with a spoiler warning about my own life and sensibilities.
That said, the above preview for Wheatley’s latest flick, the lovers-gone-bloody-wrong dark comedy thriller Sightseers delivers on all fronts. Admittedly, it’s the same balls-deep-in-crazy trailer we showed you last year, but that was for its release in the U.K., where Wheatley is based, and this is for the U.S. release, which didn’t have a release date at the time, and now it does. Sightseers will show you a love story like no other whenever it hits theaters on May 10 – albeit not all theaters, given this is from IFC Films – but it will also hit your TVs and computers over the head three days later on May 13 via VOD.
Does it even matter what this film is about? Okay, for some people, I guess. Tina (Alice Lowe) is a very sheltered girl who sees her new boyfriend Chris (Steve Oram) as something of an escape, following him along a personal journey that winds up getting a little too personal, as everything Chris comes across seems to get under his skin, and Tina stays along for the ride. To call it Natural Born Killers meets God Bless America might cheapen it, but the U.S. usually takes two films to get one film’s worth of British satire.
By the by, here is co-star Alice Lowe playing David Bowie…er, Daviw Bowie…on the hilarious British series Snuff Box.
