Suicide Club

This weird low budget Japanese film asks, Are you connected to yourself? To understand the concept of this movie you have to understand Japanese culture a bit. In Japan, everything is much more group related and being solo means you're likely to be cast aside. The story starts with a memorable scene in which over fifty high school students jump to their deaths in front of an oncoming train. A series of suicides follows which baffles investigators. I won't say much more on the story in risk of giving anything away. Reportedly shot for around $250,000 on 35mm is impressive and certain scenes were shot without formal permission. Ironically, the train station at the opening of the film where teenagers die has had some real life suicides associated with it. Spooky. The film isn't perfect and it's a bit hard to keep track of certain characters sometimes but the overall effect is pretty powerful. It did stir up some emotion in me. Check it out!

Suicide Club is a typically energetic and hyper quirky cinematic treat from Japan. What you may need to know to really enjoy this happy hell-ride is that for 'director' read 'performance artist'. Director, Shion Sono is better known as the man behind many a controversial and largely impromptu public performances 'sans camera'. The other thing you may need to know is that the train station featured at the beginning of the film was notorious for suicides. So much so that Japanese officials allowed a special 'suicide tax' to be levied on the families of those people committing suicide at this station (and others like it) to deter disillusioned salarymen from continuing create train delays.

According to Sono, he shot alot of the scene as he would direct as performance pieces. Without formal permission, he grabbed his actors and had them pile into the station and do their thing. I doubt there are many 'Hollywood' that would even contemplate such a risk, let alone pull it off with such energy and vision. This type of Japanese cinema is a bittersweet candy bar. Dont try and savour it, just enjoy the rush cause you may start to feel and little sick at some point soon.

Shinjuku Station in the evening rush hour. High school girls throng the packed platform, dominating with their raucous chatter, jangling bags and provocatively short skirts. As the commuter rapid approaches, something bizarre happens - 54 girls join hands and step reverentially on the platform edge. Given the title of the film, it is no big stretch to guess what happens next.

A veteran detective (Ryo Ishibashi) and jaded younger colleague (Masatoshi Nagase) suspect a grand plot, but are thwarted in their attempts to investigate by weary seniors. Clues are supplied by The Bat, a more web-savvy mysterious informant. Can the detectives uncover the conspiracy and prevent more suicides? That is as much narrative analysis as the story can bear, as it veers off course in the second half into surrealism, MTV theatricals, and heavy-handed symbolism. "There is no suicide club" declares a juvenile voice on the phone, continually clearing its throat. Whether there is or isn't is a question never fully resolved.

Don't be taken in by reviewers who tell you that you have to be Japanese to understand this film - my Japanese students and friends are as baffled by the story as anyone else. Sion's film never quite lives up to that opening sequence in Shinjuku Station, but it compels you to go with it to the end, and provides a few thrills along the way. It is a shame it does not all quite pull together. But there are enough digs at Japan's shallow celebrity culture, crippling generation gap, obsessive consumerism, and indeed freakishly high suicide rate to make this worth watching.

In short, great visuals, shame about the script.

I really like 'Suicide Club'. This is a movie that manage to be sometimes scary, and from start to end pretty unpredictable & nerve wrecking. This is not achieved through the basic horror/ thriller formula but rather by using this format in a very personal and original way. Instead of using some crazy person or a monster as a killer with a defined purpose, director Sion Sono puts his characters (and us as viewers) face to face with death more as it actually is: something we all carry with us, but nobody can understand and nobody can escape. So as the story begins, the police that try to investigate the sudden occurrence of mass youth suicide can't rely on previous experiences. How do you stop violent death when the killer actually is inside the mind of the victims? And if you don't know how or why this happens, can you even protect yourself? This is in many ways a much more fascinating & disturbing concept than the extremely over-exploited serial killer running around with a knife/gun/axe or whatever.

In conjunction with the suspense there's some quite poetic parts which touches on the everlasting question: if you can't find a reason behind death, can you really find any reason to live? In this hi-tech, constant mass communication world maybe a lot of us are spending our time trying to escape from such profound questions by engaging in mindless distractions & superficial relations, never contemplating that these actions might be just as empty & worthless as a non-existence. One notion that the movie conveys is that since death is the only inescapable thing inside all of us, we won't find the true core of life anywhere else. We have to search deep within ourselves.

I rate 'Suicide Club' 8/10. For me it was both entertaining & thought provoking.

First of all, I looked at another comment by someone named rrobins2-1, who said that this movie is "not for the Japanese ignorant," that it has a lot to do with Buddhism and Shintoism, and that it's perfectly understandable from a Japanese point of view.

Mr. rrobins2-1 obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. I have lived in Japan, I speak the language, and I know that his comments are ignorant, which is ironic because that's what he claims others are. First of all, many Japanese people don't follow any religion, nor do they know a great deal about them. Second, every Japanese person I spoke to said the same thing about the movie: "I didn't understand it." So much for that perfectly understanding Japanese point of view. Anyway, now that that's finished, on to the review:

The beginning parts of the movie show a lot of promise. Teenagers are killing themselves, and being happy about it to boot. The police are looking into it, believing that it's more of a murder, and someone is causing it. Throughout the movie, you see their futility in trying to figure things out, and the scenes that feature mass suicide are very intense and well-done, but there ends up being so many different things in the movie that don't amount to anything, and their is no real conclusion to the film.

First off, there's a girl who informs the police of a website that's connected to the suicide. She attempts to find out the cause of the deaths. It seems that she would be an important character, but she's not in very much, and she doesn't do anything. This goes with all the characters. There are many characters in the movie, but none of them are developed, and many times you're left wondering why they're in the movie to begin with. There's a weird Rocky Horror-esquire musical performance about halfway through the movie, which many people believe is way out of character for the rest of the movie. Anway, I don't want to spoil anything, so I will just say that the story doesn't end, and with the way things stand at the end of the movie, it's impossible to understand how these people were convinced to kill themselves the way they were.

Going through all the stuff in the movie quickly: There's the mass suicides, Cops that are out of touch, a giant roll of stitched together human flesh of the people who have or will commit suicide, a weird j-pop band who's name is misspelled numerous times throughout the movie, the weird, gay cultist who sings wants to be famous, coughing children who know everything about the situation and give cryptic clues about it. All of these, as well as the stuff I neglected to mention, either come out of the blue, or are barely in the picture (or both), with no explanation (and almost no clues), leading you to wonder what they are doing in the first place. I know it's supposed to be a satire, but if half the people who watch it don't understand it, how are you supposed to get your message across?