Free Flick Fridays: Wristcutters: A Love Story

By Elisabeth Donnelly

A road-trip romantic comedy set in a limbo world for recent suicides, it's safe to say that Wristcutters: A Love Story is a truly strange film.

Wristcutters: A Love Story

Dir. Goran Dukic (2006)

A slight digression: musician and sometime actor, Eugene Hutz, best known for his work as Gogol Bordello's frontman and as Alex in the film version of Everything is Illuminated, must have the charisma of 1000 suns. Or the type of charisma that inspires people to become obsessed with him. There's a documentary on him, The Pied Piper of Hutzovina, and Madonna's debut as a director, Filth and Wisdom, is mostly centered around Hutz. Wristcutters: A Love Story, has a central character of Eugene, a Russian musician played by actor Shea Whigham, who is based on Hutz. Imagine how charismatic and interesting Hutz must be to inspire so many people's art... Mindboggling, right?

And in Wristcutters, Eugene shows our hero, Zia (an all-grown-up Patrick Fugit), around the afterlife limbo for suicides where the movie is set. Based on the short story Kneller's Happy Campers by writer and sometime filmmaker Etgar Keret (Jellyfish), Wristcutters is, at its base, a simple love story. (It has also been adapted into a graphic novel called Pizzeria Kamikaze.) Dumped by his girlfriend, Zia commits suicide with a Tom Waits record on the hi-fi, and once he's arrived in limbo, he sets off with Eugene to find this girl again. Along the way, the two friends pick up a girl, Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), who needs to go see the man in charge since she didn't really commit suicide. By the time we meet Waits as a commune leader named Kneller, the movie veers from love to spirituality and it truly becomes a matter of life and death.

The road movie is a fun, hoary genre, and setting it in a world as willfully weird as this one gives Wristcutters a certain drive. Filmed in a desaturated stretch of desert and sun, it's truly a film where the audience isn't quite sure of the plot and where the characters are going. It's a bummer that films like these don't get much of a chance for typical theatrical release these days; but thank goodness to Hulu for giving it a new life.