“What a perfect punishment,” muses 23 year-old suicide Zia (Patrick Fugit), gazing at the ceiling of his afterlife bedroom. “Everything’s just like it was before, only a little worse.” That there’s a special purgatory for suicides is the first of many demands this promising debut from director Goran Dukic makes of you.
But as Zia befriends a musician, a hitcher (Shannyn Sossamon) and a grizzled veteran (Tom Waits), their shared recognition of the comic melancholy of suicide rings true. As entertaining as it is moving, and occasionally hilarious, you wish Dukic had been economical with the wackiness, because you suspect he’s saying something worth understanding.
