movie review- wristcutters: a love story

My friend Simon gave me this movie to watch, promising it was going to be rad. In turn I promised him that I would write an in depth subarashii review instead of offhandedly saying “Oh yeah… I watched that movie you gave me… wristcutters. It was cool, thanks!” So here it is Simo, in all its rambling, incoherent, tangential glory. My first subarashii film review!

Now, it has been quite some time since I attempted to review a film. I distinctly remember the last time was for school, and I reviewed “The Mummy Returns”. I will be the first to admit that it was a pile of maggot filled shit. I consider myself a competent writer and got good marks in everything else, but I suppose movie reviews weren’t really my forte *shrug*. I didn’t so much ‘review’ it as I gave a blow-by-blow account of every single minute. It was like reading the Wikipedia review of Silent Hill, which I actually had to read in order to understand what the fuck HAPPENED!! I watched the whole thing and at the end I went ‘uh, what!?” it is so bad. Anyway.

Wrist Cutters. I knew absolutely nothing about this film and had never heard of it, plus it was a burnt disc so I didn’t even have a cover to give away clues or show who was in the cast. All I knew was that I was going to see some slashed wrists. I’m sure that if you haven’t seen this and you know the title I won’t be ruining much to say that within 2 minutes I did see some prime wrist cutting action. I have to say there is A LOT of blood in that sink. I knew what he was going to do but I still gasped at the sheer amount of blood. I thought that maybe it was filled with water and then the blood added to the volume. I’m not sure. I have never seen a person bleed to death so I suppose I am a little uneducated in that field. I brought this up with Josh last night and he said “Obviously he filled it with hot water and dipped his hands in to help the blood flow quicker…” as if I should have known this fact from birth. When I asked how he could have immediately realized this, he said that he thinks about a lot of things and that if he ever wanted to commit suicide he would do it properly, that’s for sure. Concerning and weird as this was, I brushed it off and went back to my thoughts about the film.

The main character is named Zia, and is played by Patrick Fugit (aka the boy from Almost Famous) and he has some facial hair in this one, just in case you are interested. His relationship with his pretty and IMO slut-face girlfriend ‘Desiree’ comes to an end, and this is the reason he kills himself in the first scene. The next thing you know, he wakes up in the afterlife for suicides. I was a little confused thinking that perhaps he survived and went back to living a crap life dealing with his actions, but actually nope – it’s suicidal purgatory for him baby. This new dark world freaked me out at first because I thought there was going to be a shoddy “dark silent hill” vibe, but luckily it was not so. phewwww

So, in this new world, Zia finds himself unable to be happy, smile, or love, and each day is a mundane dull routine. He meets a few people who help him to understand things a little better, and we get to see how they died – aweeesooomme! The strangest one is a Russian guy named Eugene who becomes his companion, but I won’t give too much away. One day Zia runs into an old friend who informs him that Desiree killed herself too, about a month after he “offed”. The main part of the film sees Zia and Eugene driving around the desolate plains in order to find Desiree so the 2 can be together in death when they couldn’t in life. They meet some new people along the way, and the plot thickens into a bit of a moral dilemma for Zia – what would a love story be without a moral dilemma!? There are many other strange characters; there is even some Will Arnett (GOB) action in there too for good measure.

This movie was dark and lovely, and even made me cry a little – the last 10 seconds are beautiful! Thank you Simon for lending me this movie. I look forward to the next one :)