Movies about suicide tend to paint bleak, unhappy pictures of the world we live in. Wristcutters: A Love Story boldly takes the opposite tack, passing on all that plumbing-the-depths-of-the-human-condition garbage to suggest that killing yourself might actually be a fun opportunity for self-reflection and personal growth.
The setup — in which moony-eyed placeholder Patrick Fugit searches for his lost love in a poorly explained afterlife populated only by other suicides — smacks of shallow gimmickry, and while director Goran Dukic gestures towards morbid black comedy and some kind of metaphysical angst, Wristcutters is in the end just a sleepy road movie too lazy to capitalize effectively on its own conceit.
The sheer brashness of the concept at least promises shock value and bong-session philosophizing, and the glib treatment of suicide is certainly exploitative, but the movie never really manages to be edgy or provocative: Dukic has nothing urgent to say about life or death, or about the reasons that some people choose to forego the one for the other. But even he must agree that life is too precious to waste on movies this vacant, glib, and cowardly.
Opens October 19
The setup — in which moony-eyed placeholder Patrick Fugit searches for his lost love in a poorly explained afterlife populated only by other suicides — smacks of shallow gimmickry, and while director Goran Dukic gestures towards morbid black comedy and some kind of metaphysical angst, Wristcutters is in the end just a sleepy road movie too lazy to capitalize effectively on its own conceit.
The sheer brashness of the concept at least promises shock value and bong-session philosophizing, and the glib treatment of suicide is certainly exploitative, but the movie never really manages to be edgy or provocative: Dukic has nothing urgent to say about life or death, or about the reasons that some people choose to forego the one for the other. But even he must agree that life is too precious to waste on movies this vacant, glib, and cowardly.
Opens October 19
