A dedicated team of journalists and photographers bringing you the hottest Nottingham music, entertainment and events news and reviews, 24-7

Home News Reviews Interviews Blog Diary Competition Contact

Wristcutters: DVD Review

2008-05-16 09:17:05

Wristcutters is a bad acid trip of a love story starring Patrick Fugit as Zia; a depressed couch-bound misfit who wakes up one morning in his apartment and after a silent spring clean slits his wrists in the bathroom. What you get is five minutes, no dialogue, and one dead lead actor.

It is an uncompromising and unusual start to the film. The next ninety minutes leads the viewer down the rabbit hole of surrealism. Zia finds himself in a dark and bizarre afterlife reserved for suicides – a kind of waiting room for people depressed beyond tablets. Zia wanders aimlessly around the holocaust landscape, living in a heat blasted desert town working as a pizza chef during the day and drinking heavily in pool hall frontier bars every night.

Wacky road trip

Over beers and cigarettes he meets Eugene, a dead Russian rock star who killed himself on stage, and together they head on the kind of wacky road trip Hunter S Thompson would be proud of. Together they travel through the scorched earth and windswept highways in a bright orange station wagon held together with reams of masking tape. After picking up Mikal, a hitchhiker who claims she is in the afterlife by mistake, they head off on a road trip through the washed out grey dustbowl of a post apocalyptic world they inhabit.

Along the way, kind of like Wizard of Oz on heavy downers and Prozac, the odd trio meet a dysfunctional menagerie of characters, most notably Kneller (Tom Waits), a shambling and stumbling shell of a man ostensibly looking for his dog but harbouring a secret knowledge that will change the lives and deaths of the characters forever.

Quirky and undeniably life affirming

It is uplifting and touching in equal measure – the suicide afterlife would be no-one’s idea of heaven but it’s refreshing to see a film that doesn’t preach about accepted versions of utopia or play the God and religion card every chance it gets. It is a charming, quirky and undeniably life affirming film. The tone is meditative as it explores the big themes of life and death without ever getting swamped by philosophical posturing. It has no wisdom to share or advice to give, just skewed theories to expound, as the characters stumble around in the darkened maze of absurdist humour and moments of clarity.

In death everyone seems to be looking for but hardly ever finding happiness, stuck on the play, pause, repeat cycle of day-to-day existence, scrabbling around in the dirt of spiritual bankruptcy looking for scraps of meaning and joy. In its understated way the film is a celebration of the preciousness of life and the small unexpected everyday moments of magic, the disparate pieces of the jigsaw that fit together to make life so wonderful.

Gruff intensity and low-key charm

The cast, made up of largely unknown actors, are excellent. Fugit is always good value but the revelation is Shea Whigman as Eugene as the oddball Russian with an idiosyncratic outlook on life and Shannyn Sossamon as Mikal the OD victim looking for an exit from the suicide hinterland. Tom Waits also gives another performance of gruff intensity and low-key charm.

Wristcutters is a close cousin to Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. In populating his film with suicides Dukic has managed to create a film that makes you glad to be alive. The slow pace and lack of action works as it makes you want to take a minute to stop, decompress, relax and just take a look around, spend some time with your friends and loved ones and just appreciate the maddening psychedelic existence we have all parachuted into.

There aren’t many films that can resonate and hum with that much intensity while still managing to leaver the viewer with the warm hazy glow of simple happiness. This is a heart warming film and an impressive achievement.

Review: Danny Wilson

Add To :