Um...er...uh...okay. Anyone seen
Suicide Club?
Ostensibly it's a horror film that critiques fads, consumerism and disaffected Japanese youth. The film starts off well when 54 cheerful high school girls jump in front of an oncoming commuter train, much to the blood-splattered surprise of any onlookers unlucky enough to be too close. At the same time, two nurses working the night shift at a hospital calmly leap from a fifth story window to their deaths. A white duffel bag is found at both sites and their contents are rather gruesome: rolls of stitched-together human skin. So what does that mean? The cops aren't sure, but there's definitely something screwy going on. Before long, they're up to their necks in
more suicides.
So who's behind the suicides? Is it the teen pop group Dessert? The glam rock guy, who resides with his lackeys in a bowling alley amidst trussed-up-in-sheets captives? There are two mysterious characters who interact with the police. There's "Batgirl," who informs the cops of a mysterious website that posts a dot for each suicide before it happens. There's the weird kid who tries to convince the detectives on the case that there is no Suicide Club and asks philosophical questions like "Do you have a connection to yourself?" And what's with the ghosts? (Later in the film, in an unnecessary scene, the hospital security guard is confronted by the shades of the two nurses - this sequence leads nowhere and we don't see the guard again.)
Now
Suicide Club could have been a good movie, but director Sion Sono seems hellbent on making it as strange as possible. After a strong first hour, it just gets too surreal for its own good. Seriously, David Lynch would get a headache.
The issues tackled in the film are targets worth shooting at and the material should have been affecting. Unfortunately the bizarre goings-on eventually prove too distracting and confusing.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for unique and original visions - but there's a lot to be said for simple coherence of structure and plot. Lack of such seems to be endemic in Japanese horror lately (witness the nonsensical storyline in
Ringu). Is this what passes for creativity these days?
Because
Suicide Club is watchable (though you may be looking at the clock during the second half), I'll give it
out of
