| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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SUICIDE CLUB
aka
SUICIDE CIRCLE
(Jisatsu Circle)
Rating: 
Japan. 2002.
Director/Screenplay – Shion Sono, Photography – Kazuto Sato. Production Company – Omega Project Inc.
Cast:
Ryo Ishibashi (Detective Kuroda), Masatoshi Nagase (Detective Shibu), Akaji Maro (Detective Murata), Rolly (Genesis), Takashi Nomuri (Jiro), Mai Hosho (Akko Sawada), Tamo Sato (Yoko Kawaguchi)
Plot: 54 schoolgirls link hands and jump in front of the train at Shinjuku Station. As other copycat suicides sprout up and high schools form Suicide Clubs, police begin to treat the rash of deaths as suspicious. At each scene the police find a bag containing a roll that has been stitched together from squares of skin taken from the victims that will be at the next mass suicide. At the same time a mystery hacker directs the police to a website that is counting the number of victims killed before they die.
Several Japanese films in recent years have taken up the theme of wayward youth – see the likes of Battle Royale (2000) and Blue Spring (2001). You might as a result begin to suspect that Japanese teens have lost control and are heading on a one-way ticket to the edge of the cliff. Suicide Club is the latest film to jump on this bandwagon – and it does have some alarming real world parallels as such suicide clubs among disaffected teens is becoming quite a social problem in Japan. (Indeed this particular webpage gets an alarming number of hits from search engines under the phrases like ‘suicide clubs’ and ‘japanese suicide clubs’). Although rather than any real sociological portrait of wayward Japanese youth, Suicide Club is really more of a film that is firmly centred in the tradition of the recent Japanese horror wave that began with Ring (1998).
Suicide Club starts quite promisingly. There’s an attention-grabbing opening where 54 schoolgirls line up on a railway platform, join hands and jump in front of the train, splattering the train and platform with a tide of blood. Director Shion Sono gets right the entertainingly schlocky mix that made Ring so much fun. The film comes filled with scenes that sit between schlock horror and dark humour – giggly pupils gathering on the roof of a building, spontaneously deciding to form a suicide club and jumping to their deaths; the spookiness at the hospital and the quite surreal image of the bloodied bag sliding into view; the revelation of the glitter rock villain who karaokes songs while stomping on what look like hamsters writhing in bags. These scenes are tempered by a intriguing building mystery – the mysterious website counting the deaths of the victims in advance, the enigmatic teenage girl hacker The Bat tipping the police off, and the wonderfully grisly image of strips of skin each taken from different victims and sewn into a ribbon and left at the previous crime scene. Even if the balance between serial killer thriller and black comedy schlock sits uneasily, Suicide Club creates a compulsively fascinating sense of mystery as to what on Earth is going.
... Only for Shion Sono to promptly lose it altogether. It soon rapidly becomes apparent that as screenwriter Shion Sono has as little idea as to what is really going on as the entirely baffled audience does. There’s a sort of explanation that goes on towards the end where we are shown victims at the concert being lined up and having the strip of skin cut off with a plane saw and see that the suicides are being programmed via subliminal messages inside cellphones and pop videos. However there is zero explanation whatsoever of the agency behind all the suicides, unless one can believe the ever-so-slightly improbable notion that they it is being stage-managed by a pre-adolescent pop band. There’s no explanation of how the suicides are chosen, who masters the website, and most of all why, except for the kid band mouthing something unclear about the heroine about losing her connection to herself.
The sort-of explanation comes quite close to Claude Chabrol’s Dr M/Club Extinction (1990), which was about a mastermind programming people to mass suicide using subliminals inside mass media. There’s maybe something also something of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s deeply unfathomable Cure (1997) about a mystery man hypnotizing people into becoming killers, as well as Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001), which was also about mass suicides. But in comparison to Kurosawa, Suicide Club seems acutely confused, with Sono’s seeming need to go off on a tangent with a new idea every five minutes, making the film seem just amateurish and muddled. Even as a police procedural it is rather unbelievable – it is only some three-quarters into the film before the police actually come up with the idea of tracking down the host of the website, which is something so obvious that you wonder why it wasn’t the first thing on their list.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2003
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