With a title and subject as dour and forbidding as a rainy Scottish afternoon, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is nevertheless a thoughtful and charming affair. Its director, Lone Scherfig, is a Dane with few connections to Glasgow, where the film is set (this is also her first English-language film). Her previous film, Italian for Beginners, was set in suburban Denmark, and though the rainy Glaswegian streets feel a million miles from there, Scherfig demonstrates an authentic sense of what life is like in cold, northern towns.

The film's title is a blunt statement, and also the main action of the piece: Wilbur (Jamie Sives) does want to kill himself, so he can take up residence beside his parents, who currently reside six feet under in a local cemetery. He unsuccessfully tries various methods, in scenes that are grimly amusing, before winding up in hospital under the eye of an eccentric but caring psychiatric team. His brother, Harbour (Adrian Rawlings), thinks Wilbur just needs a girlfriend, but when an attractive loner, Alice (Shirley Henderson), comes calling at their family bookstore, she takes to Harbour. Soon they make up an odd little family -- Harbour, Alice, Wilbur and Alice's bookworm daughter, Mary (Lisa McKinlay).

Wilbur, who longs for Alice himself but recognizes his death wish means he doesn't have much to offer, starts making tiny changes in his life. The movie also shifts by slow degrees from a black comedy not unlike the 1972 cult classic,Harold and Maude, to a love story, then finally on to tragedy. Wilbur is slow and serious, but its brain is in the right place, and Scherfig's carefully nurtured series of small moments adds up to something profound.

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