Zea (Patrick Fugit) and Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) are young and hot. They’re also dead. Zea slit his wrists, Mikal OD’d, now they’ve hooked up for a road trip in the afterlife where, they’re disgusted to find, everything is the same, only worse.
Based on a short story by Israeli hipster Etgar Keret, and directed by Croatian Goran Dukic, Wristcutters has a solid indie pedigree, underscored by an irresistible soundtrack by gypsy punks Gogol Bordello.
Visually, this is a smart take on the afterlife as a dusty reject zone of the real world. Shot with the distressed texture of battered jeans, it’s a compelling vision of a hellishly alienated American heartland, where mom and pop’s roadside store has degenerated into something squalid and namelessly depressing.
That the film was shot on location in LA speaks volumes for its sense of ennui. Here again is the violent dislocation of America’s teenagers explored in The Chumscrubber and given a gruesome resonance by Virginia Tech.
But while there are timely things to be said about this generational malaise, Wristcutters falls into the same trap as Arie Posin’s satire. Rather than exploring the roots of teen suicide, Dukic is more interested in his own self-conscious cool. With his jaunty angles, offbeat surrealism and a cast seemingly ripped from the pages of a grisly fashion mag (Shannyn Sossamon is the best looking junkie in the before-, during- or afterlife), he substitutes insight and empathy for pseudo-profundity and artless posing.
By the time the ending removes any sense of moral consequence from Zea and Mikal’s actions, all you’ll have taken away from Wristcutters is a couple of new songs for your iPod. It’s yet another shallow outing from a Sundance Institute grad.
