Morbid ‘Wilbur’ already DOA

By the end of “Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself,” Danish director Lone Scherfig’s English-language debut, you’ll want to kill Wilbur yourself before he does you the favor.

An austere black comedy, “Wilbur,” which opens April 9, is set in and around a dreary Glasgow bookshop inherited by Harbour North (Adrian Rawlins), whose younger brother, Wilbur (Jamie Sives), keeps making halfhearted attempts at self-annihilation.

“Wilbur” is a morbid inventory of suicide methodology: pills, oven-fume asphyxiation, hanging, wrist-slashing, drowning. Wilbur, a nursery school aide, tries them all in selfish cries for attention.

Harbour cries. We laugh. At least, we’re supposed to.

Sample: “I don’t remember any of those things like you do,” says Wilbur. “It’s all those suicides,” replies Harbour.

Clever enough. I’m open to funereal humor. But are we supposed to stop laughing once Harbour’s pancreatic cancer comes into play?

Now, I don’t have a problem with Wilbur’s death wish being a running joke. Incompetence is incompetence. His lack of success is rightly a cause of embarrassment. One of his support group peers (Lorraine McIntosh), sensing Wilbur’s fakery, can’t stand the sight of him at meetings.

What I couldn’t stomach is that despite Wilbur’s utter lack of redeeming qualities, Miss Scherfig puts him at the center of a love story at the expense of Harbour, who gradually shrivels into a sickly naif.

Shirley Henderson’s Alice is a hospital cleaning lady and single mother who pays several flirty visits to the bookshop. Eventually, she marries Harbour, a born caregiver who takes her and her young daughter (Lisa McKinlay) into a flat already cramped with Wilbur, whom Harbour is watching over.

After passing up a nurse (Susan Vidler) and his lovelorn counselor (Julia Davis), Wilbur strikes up an affair with Alice, who professes love for the elder brother but whose loins can’t resist the younger’s sexual magnetism.

What magnetism? I can’t say. He has the charm of a skunk. The best I can surmise is the cliche that girls always go for the creeps over the nice guys.

Fine, but why should it warm my heart when these two laugh all the way to the graveyard? OK, I’m making “Wilbur” out to be a bit colder than it actually is, but not by much.

We’re talking about a movie here that asks you to follow Wilbur from a bathtub full of blood into bed with his dying brother’s wife.

Perhaps this kind of thing would be bearable if “Wilbur” maintained its satiric tone. It doesn’t. It stops being funny and never starts being inspiriting.

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