Review of Wristcutters: A Love Story (2007) by Josh G — 19 Nov 2009

I think that the idea of Wristcutters is gold. When you commit suicide, you wind up in an even drearier version of real life, a place where everything is just slightly worse. Of course, when the premise is as inventive as that, it's hard to live up to. So I guess it shouldn't surprise anybody when the movie fails to live up to expectations.

Yes, the film is about a kid named Zia (Patrick Fugit) who killed himself after his girlfriend left him. He winds up working in a crummy pizza joint and hanging out in dimly-lit bars with his friend Eugene. When the sun is out, it is always shining a little too brightly. They live in a city that is just close enough to the desert to feel like a trap. The color has been sucked out of this world, leaving everything in drab shades of gray and brown. And nobody can smile.

Really, though. The filmmakers do this part well. Everything is just slightly worse. Zia's roommate has to constantly deal with urine left on the toilet seat no matter how many times he complains to our protagonist about it. But, you see? That's just one of the minor annoyances that pepper this afterlife. They are minor differences, but their perpetuity makes them insufferable. Eugene's car has an inexplicable black hole underneath the passenger seat, so that when you go to grab a new tape to put in the cassette player (no CD players here), you might accidentally drop it and lose it forever. All of this, the little things that make this vision of the afterlife such an interesting place, it's done well. It's exciting.

But then comes the plot, and along with it the weirdness. Zia finds out that the girlfriend for whom he killed himself has also commit suicide. Thus begins a cross-country trip to search out his lost love. Along the way, Eugene and Zia pick up a third traveler: Mikal, a girl who believes that she has been cheated because she didn't technically commit suicide. It's pretty clear from the moment that Mikal enters the picture that she and Zia are meant to fall madly in love with one another. But is there love in this afterlife? The group finds themselves at a strange ranch, run by a man named Kneller. The more time they spend there, the stranger things become. Minor miracles happen - the exact opposite of the minor annoyances that happen in the rest of the world.

It's really here that it gets too strange. There's a lot of off-the-wall dialogue. As masked men take away Mikal, she yells out to Zia: "I'll be back in five minutes." Why? The story of Zia's ex-girlfriend's death is something less than compelling, and even a surprise cameo by Will Arnett doesn't really bring much to the story. Where the scenes were interesting in the first part of the film, it gets tired and same-y by the end. And since the conclusion of the romantic entanglements is a given from the start, it's hard to feel anything about how that all turns out.

So, uh... it would be easy to say that Wristcutters doesn't manage to get very far beyond its premise and call that the movie's failing. It's true that it doesn't get far past its intriguing concept, but when it really commits itself to that concept is when the movie is at its best. It really falls apart when it tries to deal in relationships and dream-states.

It's just an okay movie, and that's exactly what I was afraid it was going to be.