Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
Lone Scherfig (2002)
We recently watched the new Netflix crime thriller series Dept Q. It’s brimming with violence, physical and verbal, and, as might be expected from the Edinburgh setting, well-known Scottish actors – even though the lead detective is English (Matthew Goode) and his surprising sidekick a Syrian refugee, played by a Russian-born Swede (Alexej Manvelov). The Scots include Mark Bonnar, Kate Dickie, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Macdonald, Steven Miller, Chloe Pirrie and Jamie Sives. All have shown their talents in other TV shows and/or cinema films; all do notable work in Dept Q (though Chloe Pirrie is miscast, I think); but Jamie Sives is outstanding – as usual. He’s impressed me ever since he brought Tom Harper’s only fair-to-middling Wild Rose (2018) to exciting life during his few minutes on screen. That was the only time I’d seen Sives in a cinema role. Dept Q sent me looking through his IMDb credits for earlier – I hoped larger – parts in films. This is how I came upon Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself. I’m delighted that I did.
The film’s name rang a bell (as it would) but I knew nothing about Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, in which Jamie Sives plays the title character, a serial suicide manqué in turn-of-the-millennium Glasgow. This was the second feature directed by Lone Scherfig, who also co-wrote the screenplay, with her fellow Dane, Anders Thomas Jensen. (He has gone on to share the writing credit on two films by other high-profile Danish directors, Susanne Bier’s In a Better World (2010) and Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land (2023).) Wilbur is a true Danish-Scottish collaboration: much of the cast is Scottish; most of those involved behind the camera are Danish. There are a couple of coincidences between the film and Dept Q. The latter is adapted from the first of a series of books by a Dane (Jussi Adler-Olsen), which was set in Copenhagen[1]. From this distance in time, the most striking non-Scottish actor in Wilbur – in that he’s now much the biggest international name in the cast – would seem to be Mads Mikkelsen. Not for this viewer, though. As in Dept Q, a pivotal role is taken by an Englishman (though this one plays a Scot). Adrian Rawlins, like Jamie Sives, is one of my favourite TV actors. On the evidence of this film, Rawlins may also be, like Sives, one of Britain’s most underrated, underused film actors.
Rawlins’ Harbour is Wilbur’s elder brother. Their late parents ran a second-hand bookshop, which they left to their two sons. Harbour runs the business single-handed; Wilbur, who wasn’t interested, works, between suicide attempts, as an assistant in an infant school. (This seems surprising, given his mental state: you forgive the improbability, thanks to Jamie Sives’ interactions with the children.) Harbour takes his responsibility to look after Wilbur very seriously but he can only do so much. They don’t live together, at least at the start of the story: Harbour lives over the shop, Wilbur in a flat not too far away. Although neither brother has a partner, we get the impression from conversation that blunt chauvinist Wilbur has had more of a sex life than sensitive, courteous Harbour. Things change with Alice (Shirley Henderson again), a regular client of the bookshop: a single mother living with her young daughter Mary (Lisa McKinlay), Alice works night shifts as a cleaner at a local hospital – she sells Harbour books that she picks up there. Wilbur tells his brother that it makes sense ‘grabbing’ women; suddenly, Harbour and Alice are getting married – celebrating with Mary, Wilbur and Alice’s friend Sophie (Susan Vidler) in a Chinese restaurant. Afterwards, Wilbur stays over at the bookshop and slits his wrists in the bath. Harbour and Alice find him just in time to save his life. When Wilbur gets out of hospital this time, Harbour insists that he move into the flat above the bookshop – along with him, Alice and Mary. Wilbur and Alice are strongly attracted to each other. To try and subdue his feelings, Wilbur turns his attentions to Moira (Julia Davis), a nurse at the hospital where he’s regularly treated. It emerges that Harbour is also visiting the hospital. He tries to keep his pancreatic cancer diagnosis a secret from his wife and brother but Moira, when the four of them – plus Mary – go to the Chinese restaurant together, crassly gives the game away. Wilbur and Alice inevitably spend more time together once Harbour is receiving longer-term hospital care.
You wouldn’t guess from all that how funny the film is. Lone Scherfig brings off a difficult balancing act – between black comedy and end-of-life drama, between genuine human feeling and graveyard humour (several sequences take place in a cemetery, where the brothers’ parents are buried, and where Harbour will eventually join them). And Scherfig succeeds through integrating rather than alternating the material’s different aspects. Her lead actors were evidently aware that and how she managed to do this – that her linguistic outsiderness helped. The extras on my DVD of Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself include snippets of interviews with Jamie Sives and Adrian Rawlins (as well as with Scherfig herself and Shirley Henderson). Both seem to have found their dialogue beguiling but somehow alien, although they express this differently. Rawlins, with a baffled smile, describes the writing as ‘tilted’. Sives says delivering a Danish line in a Glasgow bookshop isn’t the same as delivering a Glasgow line there.
One contributor who didn’t get the memo is Joachim Holbek, who composed the music. Holbek’s score always seems to be straining to reduce the story to poignant sentimental drama, and Scherfig makes too much use of it. There’s a natural risk that Shirley Henderson, beautifully fragile in looks and voice, will also have the effect of over-sweetening the film but this doesn’t happen. Scherfig smartly gives Henderson a big, angry outburst – Alice’s reaction to Harbour’s secrecy about his terminal illness – that is powerfully counteractive. Alice’s adultery with Wilbur gives the narrative a larger astringency. At the same time, you don’t lose sympathy with them – not least because they feel bad about betraying Harbour. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is very good at conveying offshoots of a tragic situation that are almost more painful than that situation. Harbour is allowed out of hospital to spend Christmas Day with his family. ‘Are you going to sleep in Wilbur’s old room?’, Mary asks innocently. The answer’s no anyway because Harbour is returning to the hospital, where that night he will take an overdose of tablets to end his life. In the meantime, he recalls visiting his dying father in hospital, who mistook him for Wilbur. Harbour has always had to look out for his vulnerable younger brother, ever since the death of their mentally fragile mother, who adored her younger son. Wilbur does unforgivable things – especially the suicide attempt that interrupts Harbour’s wedding night – but he was always the charmer. Even now, Harbour accepts that, not only without bitterness but lovingly; even so, Mary’s question effectively tells him it’s time to take his leave.
There are things in the set-up and storyline that don’t really work – not in Glasgow anyway. Mads Mikkelsen’s character, Dr Horst, a psychologist at the hospital, is implausibly ubiquitous. One moment he’s supervising the talking-and-sharing group of failed suicides ‘in recovery’; next, Dr Horst is sitting alongside Harbour’s oncologist and giving diagnostic as well as psychological advice to the patient. Harbour appears always to have a private room at the hospital. Although on his last legs, he comes back to the bookshop for Christmas Day entirely unsupervised – getting a taxi there and back. Wilbur eventually gets banned from the suicidal circle, a move led by his aggressive bête noire on the group (Elaine Mackenzie Ellis). Later on, once he feels that Alice makes life worth living, Wilbur saves this woman’s life when she tries to drown herself: staged straight, this is almost tastelessly pat but the following scene between Wilbur and Alice, when he returns soaking wet to the bookshop, makes a virtue of it.
Lone Scherfig has had an oddly shaped, up-and-down cinema career. There was a cross-cultural theme of sorts even in her first feature, Italian for Beginners (2000), about a group of suburban Danish lonelyhearts trying to find love through an Italian class. In the next few years, Scherfig seemed to be developing an incisive interest in Scottish, or at least Glaswegian, life. After Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, she (and Anders Thomas Jensen) had a hand in the screenplay of Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006), according to IMDb. An all-Danish film, Just Like Home (2007), followed before Scherfig returned to Britain to make An Education (2009). That film gave her a deserved international success; in the next decade, though, she seemed to choose much less interesting and more generic British projects – One Day (2011), The Riot Club (2014), Their Finest (2016). After her first American-based film, The Kindness of Strangers (2019), bombed, Scherfig went back to Denmark to develop the TV hospital drama series, The Shift. Her latest feature film, The Movie Teller (2023), set in rural Chile and featuring an international cast, was much better received than The Kindness of Strangers.
In Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, Scherfig orchestrates her variously talented cast with great success. Although Dr Horst never quite fits, Mads Mikkelsen’s dry humour comes through increasingly well. Julia Davis has more of a comic-sketch approach to character than the film’s other main players – an approach that works splendidly in a support role like Dawn in Gavin and Stacey; here, it meshes with Moira’s dressing-up tendencies (changing her hairdo, wearing an Oriental outfit for the Chinese restaurant, and so on). And the two main men are wonderful.
I’ve never seen Adrian Rawlins in his best-known cinema role, as Harry Potter’s father. Rawlins is well into his sixties but it’s only in recent TV appearances – in The Sixth Commandment, Moonflower Murders and Patience – that I’ve really started to notice and admire him. Whatever Rawlins does, he’s remarkably truthful: that came across especially in Moonflower Murders. Although Lesley Manville carries it (and its predecessor, Magpie Murders), the casting gives nice opportunities to several of the cast to play two contrasting parts – one more serious than the other – within the same story. Rawlins was equally convincing in both. In Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, the role of Harbour, although it includes just about as much screen time as that of Wilbur, is, of course, markedly less showy. But it gives Adrian Rawlins the chance to explore and express a range of emotions, and each of them is deeply felt. He’s got great humour, too.
As for Jamie Sives … Dept Q features lashings of bitterly witty, profane dialogue (several writers were involved). Although the cast delivers this expertly, it often seems like a grandstanding house style – supposedly different characters speaking with the same voice. Sives is always the exception. He plays a police detective, James Hardy, erstwhile sidekick of the protagonist, Matthew Goode’s Carl Morck. From an early flashback sequence, with the Englishman and the Scotsman arguing about the 1966 World Cup Final, Sives’ wisecracking anger is thoroughly real and very funny. (Hardy spends most of the eight episodes lying in a hospital bed, paralysed by gunshot in the attack that kicks the story off; Sives is just as marvellous when he can hardly move at all.) Those qualities make him the ideal choice for Wilbur. You’re confident of a secure tone to the film from the sequence over the opening credits, during which Wilbur swallows tablets; tries – belt and braces – to gas himself, too; and furiously hits the oven for not doing what he wants it to. Scherfig gives the character plenty of backstory – perhaps a bit too much but that serves to ensure that his suicidal tendencies aren’t a plot device which, unexplained, might well seem questionable. After the gas oven prologue, we next see Wilbur at the hospital, in the suicides’ group, where he’s heard enough, decides it’s lunchtime and lets out a noisily impatient sigh. He goes on to show, though often by suppressing, natural appetite of a different kind whenever Shirley Henderson’s Alice is around. Jamie Sives’ combination of relaxed physicality and avidity is simply amazing.
13 June 2025
[1] The book in question, Mercy, was first adapted for the screen in the 2013 Danish film The Keeper of Lost Causes.