Helen (2008).  

Drawing inspiration from the suicide of a childhood friend, the writer and director, Sandra Nettelbeck, orchestrates a story that somehow avoids punishing the audience as much as its heroine. Demanding patience but not blood, the film keenly conveys the profound isolation of mental illness and the futility of searching for someone, or something, to blame. In roles that could have devolved into arias of melodrama, the cast never overplays its hand, fighting the omnipresent melancholy in small ways rather than large.

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Seven Pounds is a Provocative and Controversial Film About Suicide

Although Christopher Orr in a review in the New Republic is quasi-evasive in addressing the particulars because, as he puts it, “much as I’d like to spoil it, I won’t,” there is no question that his criticism of Seven Pounds centers on its ending, in which Smith’s character dies by suicide, a trope which Orr calls “morally grotesque.” His verdict:

Seven Pounds is … a dour, morally beclouded film that confuses generosity and grief, self-abnegation and self-annihilation. Yes, it comes prettily wrapped as the package of holiday uplift it fatuously imagines itself to be. But this is a present best left unopened.

Suicide Prevention News and Comment

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Wristcutters: A Love Story

When strangers meet in "Wristcutters: A Love Story," there's none of the usual chitchat about where they're from or what they do for a living. Instead, people cut right to the core of their bizarre circumstances with the question, "So how did you off yourself?"
Characters in this quirky but surprisingly lighthearted dark comedy are all suicide victims. A pitch-perfect absurdist tone is set in the opening scene of Zia (Patrick Fugit) slitting his wrists over a love affair gone sour after first fastidiously cleaning his bedroom and watering his plants. His pal Eugene (Shea Whigham) electrocutes himself while playing electric guitar with a rock band. Other more conventional means to the same end flash by, such as a hanging and a head in an oven.

HOWEVER,
Officials at a top US suicide prevention group are failing to see the funny side of billboard ads for a new comedy that show people killing themselves. Acclaimed indie movie Wristcutters: A Love Story follows a group of people who have taken their own lives, as they take a trip through purgatory. The film, starring Patrick Fugit and Shannyn Sossamon, has won a handful of top indie film prizes in America, but the director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is not a fan of the film, or its marketing campaign. In a letter to producers, Robert Gebbia says, "You don't see people making fun of other causes of death, but you see it with suicide and mental illness." But producer Courtney Solomon isn't planning to pull the ad campaign, stating, "The movie's message is that love is better than suicide. Our job is to get people into the theatre in a way that's accessible to them. There are many different ways to skin a cat. God forbid someone was considering committing suicide. This film may change their opinion."

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Wristcutters: A Love Story

Suicide is very much a laughing matter in "Wristcutters: A Love Story," a genially warped road-trip comedy that imagines a special purgatory for those who have willfully departed the land of the living. Though its absurdist inventions occasionally border on twee, this affectionate slow-blooming romance mines an understated vein of comic melancholy that the actors' wistful performances perfectly capture. Prime specialty fare is sure to find passionate admirers in limited release and marks an auspicious feature debut for helmer Goran Dukic.

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