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.
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.
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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
the pain of life doesn't end with the coming of death. Now trapped in a bleak metaphysical landscape populated entirely by suicide victims blearily searching for the joys that eluded them in the physical realm, Zia soon learns that the love is one of the latest arrivals in the dreary land of the dead. As Zia sets out to locate his ill-fated former companion and experience the joys that eluded the couple in life, he is joined in his quest by a lovelorn Russian rocker named Eugene (Shea Wigham) and an accidental tourist named Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), who's looking for a way out of the sorrowful stir. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
Wristcutters is a small film of ambitions nicely scaled to the performances and story. Who knew that affectless characters could be so oddly affecting?
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.
Goran Dukic adapts Etgar Keret's story with surreal whimsy and directs his "Route 666" tour through a wasteland of nothingness with deadpan understatement.
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.
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.
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.
Nazdrovyeh! A triumphant love story to limbo and back again. The world to where suicides are relegated is almost Sartre-esque: mundane activities and conversations, day in, day out. "Hell is other people." However, people can still make friends here, and there are miraculous oases to be found. The bond between
Zia and Eugene is rather sweet and bro-tastic. 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.
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