Suicide Club

Shion Sono’s Suicide Club is a very strange movie, which apparently has acquired something of a cult following. It’s one of those recent Japanese movies that pushes the limits when it comes to gore (which is sometimes ridiculously theatrical, as in the opening scene when 54 schoolgirls commit suicide by simultaneously throwing themselves in front of a speeding train, and blood splatters everywhere; and other times disturbingly visceral and difficult to watch, without the redeeming and distancing aestheticism of, say, Kill Bill). This is definitely not a film for the faint of heart. But it doesn’t seem to me to be very similar to sicko splatterfests like Takashi Miike’s Audition either; Suicide Club is less concerned to shock, more philosophical, and ultimately far kinkier in its subtlety.
(I’d never heard of the director Shion Sono before, but apparently he also makes gay porn flicks, as well as being known as an avant-garde poet).
In any case, Suicide Club is an oblique film, for all its gore. It seems to change genre every fifteen minutes: from grotesque social satire to police procedural to horror to Rocky Horror Picture Show knock-off to baroque tragedy to poetic meditation to feminist detective thriller to I don’t even really know what. Visually the film is also quite discontinuous from scene to scene; sometimes there’s a jerky handheld camera, other times the scenes are almost classically composed.
In terms of plot, the film is about a plague of suicides, mostly by young women, though sometimes by boys and men and older people as well. There are also chains of sewed-together pieces of human skin that are found at the scenes of some of the mass suicides.
The suicides seems to be orchestrated through the Internet and cell phones (one brief scene of cell phone fetishism especially got to me, probably because of my own predilections that way). At one point it seems that an insane death-glitter-rock band is behind the suicides, but that turns out to be a red herring. Apparently the blame really lies with a bubblegum-pop group whose singers are five 12-year-old girls who wear matching cute costumes and do coordinated dancing as they sing their relentlessly upbeat ditties.
The film ends on a ritualistic note that I didn’t entirely understand; but I don’t think tying up loose ends was in any way the point. Existential conundrums are also repeated in verbal formulas throughout, often by small children.
I don’t really know much about Japan beyond the level of cliche; but it does seem to be a culture that is as imbued with latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) pedophilia as contemporary American culture is. At least, that’s what Suicide Club suggests. It intimates disturbing links between the sexualization of young children and the hysterical insistence upon their innocence, and between both and the romanticization of death.
In short, I’m not sure Suicide Club is a great film, exactly, but it’s definitely going to stay with me for a while.
(I’d love to see an American remake, but that will never happen; this isn’t The Ring. Besides, the only way to do it justice would have to be as an unlikely collaboration between David Lynch and John Waters).

Shion Sono’s Suicide Club is a very strange movie, which apparently has acquired something of a cult following. It’s one of those recent Japanese movies that pushes the limits when it comes to gore (which is sometimes ridiculously theatrical, as in the opening scene when 54 schoolgirls commit suicide by simultaneously throwing themselves in front of a speeding train, and blood splatters everywhere; and other times disturbingly visceral and difficult to watch, without the redeeming and distancing aestheticism of, say, Kill Bill). This is definitely not a film for the faint of heart. But it doesn’t seem to me to be very similar to sicko splatterfests like Takashi Miike’s Audition either; Suicide Club is less concerned to shock, more philosophical, and ultimately far kinkier in its subtlety.
(I’d never heard of the director Shion Sono before, but apparently he also makes gay porn flicks, as well as being known as an avant-garde poet).
In any case, Suicide Club is an oblique film, for all its gore. It seems to change genre every fifteen minutes: from grotesque social satire to police procedural to horror to Rocky Horror Picture Show knock-off to baroque tragedy to poetic meditation to feminist detective thriller to I don’t even really know what. Visually the film is also quite discontinuous from scene to scene; sometimes there’s a jerky handheld camera, other times the scenes are almost classically composed.
In terms of plot, the film is about a plague of suicides, mostly by young women, though sometimes by boys and men and older people as well. There are also chains of sewed-together pieces of human skin that are found at the scenes of some of the mass suicides.
The suicides seems to be orchestrated through the Internet and cell phones (one brief scene of cell phone fetishism especially got to me, probably because of my own predilections that way). At one point it seems that an insane death-glitter-rock band is behind the suicides, but that turns out to be a red herring. Apparently the blame really lies with a bubblegum-pop group whose singers are five 12-year-old girls who wear matching cute costumes and do coordinated dancing as they sing their relentlessly upbeat ditties.
The film ends on a ritualistic note that I didn’t entirely understand; but I don’t think tying up loose ends was in any way the point. Existential conundrums are also repeated in verbal formulas throughout, often by small children.
I don’t really know much about Japan beyond the level of cliche; but it does seem to be a culture that is as imbued with latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) pedophilia as contemporary American culture is. At least, that’s what Suicide Club suggests. It intimates disturbing links between the sexualization of young children and the hysterical insistence upon their innocence, and between both and the romanticization of death.
In short, I’m not sure Suicide Club is a great film, exactly, but it’s definitely going to stay with me for a while.
(I’d love to see an American remake, but that will never happen; this isn’t The Ring. Besides, the only way to do it justice would have to be as an unlikely collaboration between David Lynch and John Waters).