Review of Suicide Club (2001) by Brian S — 04 Dec 2010

A strange and often confusing flick from the same director who gave us the outstanding "Strange Circus" and the darkly humorous "Exte: Hair Extensions." "Suicide Club" tells the tale of a series of suicides involving individuals and groups of up to 200 at a time. It's frequently bloody, generally well-acted, and very Japanese, which likely means that there are some cutural points that American viewers such as myself will miss.

Somehow, Japanese teenagers are being convinced or compelled to kill themselves via digital media such as cell phones, web sites and email. A J-pop all-girl band and a glam rocker who considers himself the "Charlie Manson of the information age" are somehow behind all this. The J-pop band is indeed encoding messages in their music and publicity photos, we find out, but how any of it causes someone to commit suicide is never made clear, nor is the extent to which the glam rocker and his cronies have anything to do with the deaths. What is clear is the film's message that people are getting so caught up in creating meaningless connections to others that they've lost their connection to themselves, and if you can't live for yourself then there's no reason to live at all. It's an interesting thought, but the execution here is bewildering, adding new twists and strange plot devices that never gel into a coherent story.

In the meanwhile, blood sprays, rolls of human skin is found in sports bags at death scenes, and there's something going on with a black butterfly tattoo on the sixth link in each chain of human skin. There's good development of tension and lots of eerily surreal atmosphere throughout. Still, this is nowhere as good an effort as director Sion Sono's other work. Sono knows how to use horror elements and shock well, but in "Suicide Club" we never get the kind of emotional involvement that he's brought us elsewhere, and while the flick survives well enough without it, it's hard to get involved with the characters and too easy to get lost in everything that's going on in this decent but convoluted outing. "Suicide Club" won't leave the viewer wanting to off himself, but it will certainly leave him scratching his head and wondering what the heck he's just witnessed.