I saw Wristcutters: A Love Story at Sundance 2006, and I enjoyed it a lot. A semi-deconstructed road-trip rom-com set in an alternate afterlife reserved for suicides, it seemed like the kind of small-scale, entirely winning if not entirely original indie that you used to be able to happen upon late at night on IFC and fall in love with. Even though it was a touch smarter and darkly cooler than Garden State (no one in Wristcutters would have the dizzy gall to suggest that The Shins could change a person’s life), I really thought it had a chance at breaking through to the same audience.

Shows what I know–apparently, there was only room for one unexpectedly “heartwarming” road-trip movie with the set design of a music video at Sundance that year, and at the end of a successful 2006 festival run, Wristcutters all but disappeared. Throughout 2006, I heard a few rumors of release dates, and read that it might go straight to DVD, but nothing ever happened.

And then Courtney Solomon entered the picture…

In March 2007, word spread that the movie had been acquired by After Dark Films, who were then in the middle of a controversy over explicitly violent billboards for torture porn blip Captivity. After Dark’s Courtney Solomon told the Hollywood Reporter that the company was planning on exploiting the suicide angle in the film’s marketing, with a campaign “featuring cardboard cutouts of characters jumping off a bridge, electrocuting and hanging themselves in keeping with the film’s suicide theme.” Said Solomon: “We just hope they don’t cause too many accidents.”

The pairing of film to distributor should seem like an uneasy fit to anyone who has actually seen the picture. Wristcutters is an extremely dry comedy and, occasionally, an almost-cloying romance; pushing it as a movie about suicide would be like marketing Knocked Up as a movie about unprotected sex. Meanwhile, Solomon is carving out a persona for himself as a William Castle with the social ethics of a Joe Francis, which is certainly annoying, but off greater concern was Solomon’s track record: he makes a lot of noise, but so far, his movies haven’t made much money. Would misrepresenting Wristcutters as “edgier” than it actually is actually do the film any good?

It’s been interesting to watch the reactions to Solomon’s marketing campaign, among those who haven’t seen the film and/or first became aware of it as an After Dark product. As Chris Thilk put it: “I had this notion of Wristcutters: A Love Story being a really, really stupid, one-joke movie designed just to honk people off. But now I’ve watched the trailer and my mind is completely changed.”

The critical assessment of the film that so far most accurately represents my experience of it is Vadim Rizov’s, at The Reeler. I feel like I shouldn’t have had to wait two years to see this movie hit the light of day; it is, as Rizov notes, “prone to occasional quirk/bathos overload,” which should have made it a much easier sell. I find myself in odd position of championing a film that I think deserves a B+ at best, just because its distribution and marketing situation has turned it into something of an underdog. Still, I think the subheading of Rizov’s review sufficiently assesses the movie’s charms: “Endearing and intelligent vision of the afterlife may soften even the hardest of hipster asses.”

Wristcutters: A Love Story opens on three screens today in New York. It expands to Los Angeles next weekend, and many more cities the weekend after that. For more info on its expansion, go to wristcutters.com