Review of Suicide Club (2001) by Eric J — 16 Jul 2009

Shion Sono's cult classic "Suicide Club" is much better known for its opening than anything else. After all, it's hard not to forget (and not tell your friends) about a film that begins with 50 Japanese schoolgirls lining up at a train station, all joyfully holding hands and giving a countdown, then jumping in front of it as you helplessly watch the train (and the station) being splattered. It was only a year after the film came out that someone had described it to me.

Although Sono has been accused of exploiting a serious subject, the film, while never pulling punches on the gore level, does have a sense of restraint. "Suicide Club" wants to highlight its country's alarming suicide rates-- the internet and being a teenager play large roles-- and wraps it within an intriguing mystery which the police department is more than eager to consider a mass murder, since large suicide pacts keep turning up and there's a website tallying the numbers. Aside from the opening sequence, Sono only depicts one more group and tells his story while the rest are merely mentioned.

(it's hard to watch the film without being reminded of a few months ago when shootings began erupting all over the United States, the later ones proclaiming it was all over the news anyway so "why not?").

What you have in store with the plot is the aformentioned investigation of a possible, centralized "suicide club", shady people delivering tips variously hinting about the aforementioned website, another site which acts like a petition to stop the suicides ("or else... and all you have to do is give your contact information"), people proclaiming that there is no suicide club, and a tweenage J-pop group that everyone has a weird obsession with, variably spelled "dessart" to "desert".

Although the movie itself does keep you guessing what will happen next, you'll probably be able to figure out the key twist within seconds. And never before has an end credits sequence been the difference between an infuriatingly anticlimactic close to a wonderfully cryptic send-off.