Wristcutters - A Love Story (2006)
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Reviews Counted: 89
Fresh: 59 | Rotten: 30
Wristcutters: A Love Story sounds like a normal enough indie flick. Boy meets girl. Boy gets separated from girl. Boy goes on a road trip with friends to find girl and gains a new perspective on life. Except everybody's dead.
Average Rating: 6.3/10
Critic Reviews: 24
Fresh: 16 | Rotten: 8
Wristcutters: A Love Story sounds like a normal enough indie flick. Boy meets girl. Boy gets separated from girl. Boy goes on a road trip with friends to find girl and gains a new perspective on life. Except everybody's dead.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 31,428
My Rating
Movie Info
Relegated to a forlorn afterlife of unsmiling lost souls and melancholy drifters as a result of committing suicide in the mortal realm, a heartbroken young man sets out to find the girl who inspired his final act of self-destruction after learning that she too has taken her own life in director Goran Dukic's adaptation of Etgar Keret's darkly comic novella Kneller's Happy Campers. A likeable young man despite his depressive disposition, Zia (Patrick Fugit) puts blade to wrist only to find that
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Cast
-
Patrick Fugit
Zia -
Shannyn Sossamon
Mikal -
Shea Whigham
Eugene -
Tom Waits
Kneller -
John Hawkes
Yan -
Will Arnett
Messiah -
Leslie Bibb
Desiree -
Mikal P. Lazarev
Nanuk -
Mark Boone Jr.
Mike -
Anthony Azizi
Hassan -
-
Abraham Benrubi
Erik -
Mary Pat Gleason
Eugene's Mother -
Nick Offerman
Cop -
Sarah Roemer
Rachel -
-
Clayne Crawford
Jim -
Azura Skye
Tanya
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All Critics (92) | Top Critics (25) | Fresh (62) | Rotten (30) | DVD (7)
Opportunities to comment on the ethical grey areas of suicide are mostly squandered and, as the pointless digressions begin to pile up, your mind begins to drift from the action on screen.
Wristcutters is a small film of ambitions nicely scaled to the performances and story. Who knew that affectless characters could be so oddly affecting?
It's such an original piece of work and I love the deliberately bleak cinematography.
All this sounds rather grim, and indeed it is -- but this backward Heaven Can Wait is also, thanks to [director] Dukic's inventive imagination, surprisingly involving and ultimately sweet.
Wristcutters is a cut above most low-budget American indies, with something original to say about the human condition and an artful way of saying it.
The future of Wristcutters as a cult favorite is less assured. Rather than benefiting from repeated viewings, the movie's charm is pretty much spent after the first half hour.
This road movie romcom won?t leave you reaching for the razor blades.
Having some laughs over suicide.
A postmortem suicide heaven filled with slit personalities, not quite born again dime store messiahs, and a grimy downscale pizza dive.
Goran Dukic adapts Etgar Keret's story with surreal whimsy and directs his "Route 666" tour through a wasteland of nothingness with deadpan understatement.
Wristcutters: A Love Story is like a suicidal Wizard of Oz.
It's certainly melancholic, occasionally funny, and ultimately life-affirming. But overall, it feels as if writer-director Goran Dukic dropped a rather promising ball.
It misses the opportunity to examine why a community of people - each of whom has already given up on life - would band together to form a new society of desperate misfits.
It is a staggeringly awful road movie, not much enlivened by the presence of Tom Waits as a wizened participant.
The purgatorial premise is pleasingly eccentric but, in the end, Wristcutters falls victim to its washed-out mood, and limps bloodlessly to a close.
A dreary, self-consciously quirky indie flick that seems to go on forever, despite an economical running time.
Veering from witty to occasionally trite, Wristcutters: A Love Story has plenty of originality on its side, but never manages to be more than the sum of its self-consciously quirky parts.
A little self-consciously kooky but with an ace soundtrack that combines gypsy punksters Gogol Bordello with real-life plug-pullers this sure beats putting your head in the oven.
Dark subject matter, but Goran Dukic's film is whimsical and determinedly optimistic about life.
For the better part of the journey this a bizarrely uplifting yarn - razor sharp, you might say.
Audience Reviews for Wristcutters - A Love Story
Super Reviewer
There is no way Patrick Fugit can look not adorable. Raven-haired Shannyn Sossamon is probably the only woman in the world who can make chewing gum with her mouth open look so good. I also dig how the filmmakers cast Sossamon and Leslie Bibb as the present and past love interests because they look so much alike with their angular jaws and thin lips.
Super Reviewer
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- Mikal: Are you joking? Do you guys like it here? Who the hell likes being stuck in a place where you can't even smile? It's hot as balls, everybody's an asshole. I just wanna go home.
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- Zia: I think she cried at my funeral, I don't mean to brag about it or anything, but I'm pretty sure she did. Sometimes I can picture her talking to some guy she feels really close to, about how they lowered me into the grave all pathetic and shriveled up like a melted chocolate bar, and how we never actually got a chance. Then the guy fucks her real nice, fuck it's all about making her feel better.
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- Zia: They went to the North Pole or whatever the place Nanuk is from is called. He wanted to meet her family and get into that throat singing, saw playing, weird instruments, and all that stuff. It's good that he's back into music, I think. And me? I think I finally understand what Kneller was trying to say.It only happens if it doesn't matter. It comes without effort. Maybe Eugene's right. Maybe I only get stuck on girls I don't have a chance of being with. I am glad for Mikal, though. I hope she got her visa all straightened out. I mean, she did say she'd be right back. Then again, Eugene's old wisdom is when a girl says that, she never does actually come back.
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- Zia: You remember the other day when you were talking about missing things from life and how you wanted to go back and I told you I didn't miss anything?
- Mikal: Yeah.
- Zia: Well... When I'm here, with you, I kind of miss myself, the way I used to be.
- Mikal: What were you like?
- Zia: I was happy at a time, obviously before I came here, but...
- Mikal: Yeah.
- Zia: Something about being here with you reminds me of that, it's just, I don't know, it's just weird to me that you can feel that in a place like this. We're all... We're all dead.
- Mikal: You know what? Most of the people that I knew before I got here were either half dead or just completely dead already...
-
- Eugene: I'm not sitting in the back.
- Zia: Why not?
- Eugene: 'Cause everybody knows guy in the back seat doesn't have a cock.
-
- Zia: Being here with you reminds me of what I was like before my suicide.
- Mikal: What were you like?
- Zia: I was happy.
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