Zia wakes up in his filthy room as Tom Waits’s swooning “Dead and Lovely” is heard coming from his record player; he spends the entirety of the song preparing. It isn’t until he cleans the room immaculately, waters his already failing plants, and puts on a tie to finesse his ragged hipster look that I know what is to come; I cover my eyes accordingly. Having recently experienced a lover’s suicide, I know these are signs that he is preparing to die.

Zia (played by Patrick Fugit of Almost Famous) has broken up with his girlfriend; afterwards, he takes his own life. He wakes up dead, in a dustbowl resembling the Palm Desert. Soon he realizes that he’s not alone on the Other Side, which is populated by suicide victims. For Zia, not much has changed, “Everything’s the same here, but just a little worse,” he says, wondering if his suicide has made him miss his girlfriend that much more. When he learns from another suicide casualty that his girlfriend has copycatted and taken her own life, he makes his post-death analysis over beers in a bar with Eugene (played by Shea Whigham), the Russian son of a family of suicide victims.

Zia and Eugene decide to go on a road trip through the world of the dead to find Zia’s girlfriend. En route, they meet more pasty-skinned folk; encounters are visualized against a monotone backdrop. In this version of purgatory, the men have bullet holes in their heads and the women seem remarkably hot.

The line, “How did you off yourself?” as spoken too many times by various characters, demonstrates once again our culture’s focus on the how of things, rather than the why.

Zia and Eugene pick up a hitchhiker—the lighthearted Mikal, played by the stunning Shannyn Sossamon—and the dark comedy accumulates another layer of meaning.

Mikal: “You guys don’t have any clue where you’re going, do you?”

Eugene: “Well, you haven’t been here very long, right? ‘Cause if anybody here had a clue, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

Humor balances wisdom in the film—for instance, the black hole actually located under the passenger seat in their car (a metaphor that unfortunately becomes trite along with their loss of a third pair of rose-colored glasses). Saved by a reminder from Kneller (the film is based on a short story, “Kneller’s Happy Campers”)—an angel played by Tom Waits himself—that Zia needn’t focus on death’s (or life’s) minor miracles, I was brought back to life. Minus the unfortunate Hollywood ending, this is one road trip film that hits a nerve. Wristcutters: A Love Story is worth watching. Not only does it force us to question our actions in this lifetime, it also urges us to consider what we’ll do once we’re on the other side.