I’m not sure Wristcutters: A Love Story quite earns the right to be so blithe about its subject matter – let alone get away with such a glibly ironic title – but the movie does manage to be more whimsical and charming than you would ever expect from a picture about suicide. It’s an inventive fantasy born of real-world tragedy. Patrick Fugit stars as Zia, a morose young man who cuts his wrists over a girl and winds up in some sort of alternate universe for suicides where “everything is the same, just a little worse.” Indeed, director Goran Dukic paints his picture with faded colors, while the actors all look slightly ghastly. The people here are unable to smile, so that one morbidly comic sequence involves Zia and a few others fruitlessly trying to contort their faces into forms of happiness. Most of Wristcutters is aimlessly existential, though Zia eventually meets a girl (Shannyn Sossamon) who accidentally overdosed and wants to file a complaint with “the people in charge.” What follows is a clever, if not entirely successful, Michel Gondry-type fantasy about nothing less than the meaning of life. Wristcutters is nowhere near as exhilarating as Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but neither is it as indulgent as his The Science of Sleep. It exists in some loopy alternative universe of its own right in between.
