Suicide Club - Manchmal lebt man länger als man denkt

Allow me to begin by saying that I don't expect this movie or this review to be "news" to very many people. However, I do believe that Suicide Club receives less acclaim than it deserves. Though the film is without doubt convoluted and at times stumbling, the virtues of its style, premise, and constant social commentary more than redeem its faults.

Before I really get started, I'll offer a bit of a fact sheet for those who don't remember the film... and *gasp*, for those that may have not heard of it or seen it. Suicide Club (2002), originally released in Japan under the title "Jisatsu Sakuru", was the 8th effort of writer and director Sion Sono, and perhaps one of the most anticipated of the burst of Japanese horror that followed the success of films such as The Ring (2002) ("Ringu" [1998] in its original Japanese rendition). Without turning this review into a biography of Sono, I would like to mention that he is not your average director. Sono has a not-insubstantial pornography direction portfolio. Luckily for those who watch Suicide Club, however, very little of the terrible porn direction cliches are put to use here.


Suicide Club opens with a somewhat notorious scene: 54 Japanese high school girls join hands. They then happily count to 3 in a sing-song chant before jumping onto the tracks before an oncoming train. The gore level here is high, to say the least: picture suction-sealed bags of blood and limbs suddenly having their seals broken all at once and you might have an inkling of what's on display here. After a perhaps over-long sequence, depending on your gore tolerance levels, we are presented with a view of a white gym bag sitting on the platform as a literal wave of blood courses around it (note that here the blood in question ceases to possess its tomato sauce color and consistency and takes on the appearance of a great deal of spilled grape juice).

From this point Suicide Club really takes off. The plot becomes increasingly convoluted and hard to follow as Sono throws us scene after seemingly random scene of suicides, intermixed with some genuinely creepy and well-acted moments that I will not spoil here. The flow of bloodshed is well-broken by one of the central story-lines involving two Japanese police investigators looking into the rash of suicides. However, these characters are never really developed enough, and so I felt little when one of them became part of the "club" and shot himself in the head.

At the film's halfway point, I had very little idea what was going on. Between cryptic rolls of stitched together human flesh found in a variety of gym bags (including the one first seen on the subway platform), the pervasive presence of the music group sensation Dessert, two separate informants providing contradictory information regarding the rumored Suicide Club, and a whole lot of random red herrings and gruesome deaths, it was difficult to pick out the main thread of the narrative.


There follows a scene and group of characters oddly reminiscent of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), that are at first presented as the real Suicide Club. However, they are brought to justice (thank god, they are a motley lot of sadists) quickly and then summarily dismissed. The film continues to stumble over itself, ending with a string of quite deep, disturbing, and at the same time uplifting scenes that somehow manage to mask (temporarily), the fact that Sono leaves us almost entirely hanging.

I believe that at this point I have pretty effectively outlined the faults of Suicide Club: a convoluted story, sparse character development, a great number of misleading scenes, and a cliffhanger ending. What I have not done is told you, the reader, why this film is a masterpiece and why you should absolutely not pass up the opportunity to see it. The most important point in Suicide Club's favor is that the entire film can be viewed as a healthy hunk of social commentary. Sono shows us the costs of our tendency to act like lemmings (in its most extreme form). As rumors of a Suicide Club grow, more and more teens begin to kill themselves, as if in a desperate attempt to follow the latest trend. This is driven home most effectively when Sono shows us a group of high school students on lunch break who, egging each other on, leap from the roof of a building to their deaths. (Cool Fact: Falling bodies explode like overripe watermelons upon impact with pavement!) Sono also comments on society's growing indifference to tragedy and violence. In one scene, a hospital security guard tries to tell a nurse of the death of the 54 schoolgirls we witness in the opening sequence, but she brushes him off, more interested in getting herself and a colleague a meal. Another scene shows a family eating dinner. They touch briefly on the recent rash of suicides, but then Dessert comes on TV and they fall to laughing and enjoying the music. Finally, Sono touches on society's susceptibility to suggestion in popular culture. Without giving away a major plot point, I will note that many of the events of the movie are based on subtle manipulation by pop culture.

Besides its brilliant social commentary, Suicide Club is wonderfully creepy and disturbing. One scene perfectly sums up the almost funny nails-on-chalkboard feeling of the movie. A young girl sees an ad on TV for a new kind of candy. She asks her dad if she can have some, and he tells her to go ask her mother. She runs into the kitchen and inquires after the candy while her mother cuts vegetables. During the course of their brief exchange, her mother stops cutting the vegetables and starts cutting off her own fingers. The girl sees the spreading blood, but does not fully understand what is going on. She runs back into the living room and sits again with the family. She says to her father: "Mom's funny," before settling in. Meanwhile in the kitchen, her mother continues to silently mutilate herself.


Finally, I cannot neglect to mention the philosophical ideas that are on display in Suicide Club. Most importantly is the question of our connection to ourselves. The film's characters extropolate that we have connections to the world around us that live on after we die. It goes on to question whether we have such a relationship with ourselves, and whether the answer to this question influences whether or not there is life for us after death. These ideas play a major role in the resolution of the film.

Despite its faults, Suicide Club is a masterpiece of filmmaking that combines disturbing and grisly scenes, biting social commentary, and quasi-deep philosophy into a dark package that, no matter your overall opinion, you will not soon forget.

Rating:


or 9.3/10