Wristcutters: A Love Story

 by Eric Graf
 published on Wednesday, April 23, 2008

There's nothing better than getting lost in a director's vision, but sometimes the director can get lost, too.

"Wristcutters: A Love Story" is exactly like that. Director Goran Dukic uses smartly employed techniques, including a perfect color palette, to create his own little alternate universe. Unfortunately, Dukic's film fails to pay off on the big potential.

"Wristcutters" follows Zia, played by Patrick Fugit from "Almost Famous", after he has killed himself. Nearly the entire movie takes place in the afterlife, where Zia is adrift in a world populated by others who also killed themselves.

This purgatory for post-suicidals is lax and hazy. It's full of people who, it turns out, were actually happier before they did the deed. Zia spends a lot of his time on the road and damn it if purgatory doesn't look a lot like Yuma.

It's a fantastic conceit — an afterlife full of people who offed themselves that's almost exactly like normal life, except a little worse. It's a great little idea, which is actually how it started.

"Wristcutters" is based on a short story by Etgar Keret. In such short form, the idea is a perfect piece of absurdity and odd beauty.

But "Wristcutters" is a 90-minute movie that quickly overtakes its inspired premise to become a typical indie romance presented in a strange fashion. It's been done countless times before: life isn't about the destination, it's about the journey — only this time, it's the afterlife. It's a forgivably cliché lesson, but it's played out and delivered too slowly here.

Worse still is the completely stupid ending that fails to live up to the premise. Again, the benefits of the short story form become clear. A short story need not have such an easy ending, partly because it doesn't really need an ending at all.

But Dukic insists on wrapping the movie up nice and neat. A story so dedicated to the absurd deserves at least a similarly odd ending, just as an audience interested in seeing such a movie deserves the same.

— eric.graf@asu.edu.