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Wristcutters: A Love Story | 2006 | R | - 5.7.7

A young man (Patrick Fugit), distraught over breaking up with his fiancée, slits his wrists, only to realize that the afterlife for those who commit suicide is very similar to this reality, only a bit more rundown and unpleasant. When he discovers that his ex-fiancée has also killed herself, he sets out on a road trip to find her. Also with Shannyn Sossamon, Shea Wigham, Will Arnett, Leslie Bibb, Tom Waits, Shea Whigham and Jake Busey. Directed by Gordon Dukic. [1:28]

SEX/NUDITY 5 - A dwarf woman is shown almost topless, drinking with customers in a bar -- she is wearing large pasties and a bikini bottom.
 Several flashback scenes involve a young man and young woman shown from the waist up, sitting on a beach, talking together and kissing briefly; she wears a halter top that shows a little cleavage and he is wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and once they kiss and both say, "I love you."
 A young man and a young woman fall asleep on a beach at night, he with his arm around her; they awake the next morning and stand up to find hundreds of used condoms and broken bottles under them.
 A young man lies in bed, wearing no shirt, but covered from the waist down. A man walks out of his room and is wearing long drawstring pants and no shirt. Two men and a woman lie in a tent, sleeping, fully clothed.
 A man slaps a young woman on the buttocks, she stops, and then walks away without reacting and he later kisses her. A man goes into a restaurant and stares at the legs and buttocks of a woman wearing very skimpy denim shorts.
 A woman lies down on a couch and the camera pans away to a steaming teakettle, implying sex.
 A man tells a woman about another man, "He was trying to get into your pants." One man asks another how many times he had sex.


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VIOLENCE/GORE 7 - A young man is shown from the shoulders up doing something in a sink: he looks closely at himself in a mirror and collapses, the camera pans down to a sink full of dark red blood, and with two bloody razor blades on the sink's edge; the man is shown face down on the floor with pools of dark red blood beneath both wrists.
 A man (in an afterlife sequence) is shown with a gaping, decayed hole in his head, and a flashback shows him with two other men, all soldiers in a war, carrying rifles, with bullets being shot and mortar explosions around them; the man puts the muzzle of his rifle into his mouth and pulls the trigger (we do not see the result of his suicidal shot on the battlefield). We see a man (in an afterlife sequence) with a large, wide gash running form his left temple down across his face and into his throat and shoulder blade (it is not bleeding and he looks embalmed).
 A man who claims to be a king and a messiah stands on a rooftop before a crowd, takes out a large dagger, and plunges it into his own chest (we see a small dark reddish-brown spot); a young woman by his side pulls the knife out and he collapses to his knees and seems to die.
 A man plays an electric guitar and pours a bottle of beer on it in order to electrocute himself (we see sparks and the man convulses).
 A scene is shot from inside an open grave and a young woman standing above cries as shovelfuls of dirt are dumped into the grave and we hear that she is the fiancée of the young man in the grave.
 A young woman is seen falling from the sky face down, as her voice in voiceover describes herself as flying off a hospital roof; she falls straight into the camera lens, but the scene ends before she makes contact. A young woman is shown dead in her kitchen, with her head in a gas oven (we cannot see her face) and a voiceover states that she committed suicide. A woman is shown briefly, covered by her gown and bedclothes in a hospital bed in a clinic and we hear that she killed herself. A young woman is shown lying dead in the snow, wearing a thin dress and heavy boots.
 A 10-year-old boy stands on a table with a noose around his neck, crying that there is no reason to live; his adult brother talks him down from the table and once the child is down, the brother slaps him across the face.
 A woman is shown passed out in the passenger seat of a vehicle, wearing a wide rubber band around her left arm and holding an empty hypodermic syringe in her right hand.
 A young man and a young woman wake up on hospital gurneys beside each other in a hospital ER, look at each other, smile in recognition and we see the man's wrists bandaged in gauze (a slight amount of blood is showing).
 An older man lies in the road asleep and a car nearly runs over him, but swerves at the last moment and crashes on the side of the road, shattering the left headlight and exuding smoke. A man is shown in a wheelchair with his right arm and his right leg in casts.
 A young man's roommate yells at him constantly and throws a cottage cheese container at him.
 A young woman in an afterlife sequence defaces every sign she sees destroying them or marking out words and adding her own with a black magic marker. Objects are dropped into a black hole in the floorboards of a man's station wagon and lost forever (the man yells each time this happens). A young man kicks down a sign in anger, gets into his car, jumps into a black hole and floats around for some time.
 Many men who seem to be government agents disperse a crowd, telling people to go home; they take one young woman with them for questioning. A young woman is arrested and placed into the back of a patrol car for defacing signs, but is released quickly when a friend asks the officer to ignore the incident.
 In several afterlife scenes taking place in a dimly lit restaurant a young man and people who have committed suicide guess how others "offed" themselves, as a sort of betting game.

LANGUAGE 7 - 22 F-words, 12 scatological references, 9 anatomical terms, 9 mild obscenities, 7 religious exclamations, name-calling (jerk, chick, dipstick, hooker).

SUBSTANCE USE - A woman is shown passed out in the passenger seat of a vehicle, wearing a wide rubber band around her left arm and holding an empty hypodermic syringe in her right hand. After the opening scene, bottles of beer are shown in almost every scene, two men and a woman drink vodka at a train station, a middle-aged man drinks from a beer can while driving, at a large dinner at a private home vodka is poured around the table and drunk by all the adults, and there are several scenes of two young men and a young woman drinking from bottles of beer and smoking while driving a car. People are shown smoking cigarettes in most scenes throughout the movie.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Suicide, relationships, depression, loss, funerals, loneliness, mental stress, reality vs. delusions, miracles, magic, imagination, substance use, coma, recovery.

MESSAGE - Life is worth living, after all.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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