There’s a thin line between a personal video essay and self-indulgence and, unfortunately, An Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist leans heavily toward the latter. The film follows Owen Lowery who decided to spend a year doing things he always wanted to do after being hospitalized for attempting suicide. These things range from the trivial (squirrel fishing) to the painful (scorpion bite, getting tazered) to the banal (hang gliding, bungee jumping).

Two sequences deal with heavier issues and provide the film’s only interesting and engaging parts. Lowery’s attempt to reconnect with his father by bringing him to a studio to record a song his father wrote nearly saves the film. Lowery’s attempt to confront his childhood abuser holds promise but the abuser refuses to appear on camera, so all that is offered is an audio-recording of the encounter.

Despite the seriousness of the topic, much of the film feels disingenuous. The film is punctuated by Lowery reading from his embarrassingly puerile journal entries. Someone should have intervened and warned him that these entries sound like bad high school poetry. Some of the scenes (like him banging his head against a wall) feel staged. By the end of the film, Lowery admits to not knowing what effect this year had, thereby confirming my suspicions about the pointlessness of the endeavor and of the film.