Cover Art

Credits

Director: Sion Sono Starring: Ryo Ishibashi, Masatoshi Nagase, Yoko Kamon, Kimiko Yo, Hideo Sako, Rolly Screenplay: Sion Sono Country: Japan

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Suicide Club opens with the mass suicide of fifty-four Japanese schoolgirls who jauntily link hands and throw themselves in front of an oncoming train at Shinjuku station. Blood and body parts go flying in every direction, before segueing into the sugary pop of all-girl pre-teen band Dessert and the catchy number "Mail Me." Even here there is a darker subtext - check out the lyrics to this little number 'Mail me/I'm sure you never knew/How I feel about you, this is real/I need to hear from you right now or I'll die'.

The police initially put the suicides down to a "suicide fad" amongst school kids and don't feel that there is anything worth investigating. However, two Officers, Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi from Audition) and Shibusawa (Masatoshi Nagase) think that there is something more going on, and they have their suspicions further aroused after receiving a tip from a web blogger known as The Bat. She informs them about a peculiar website that seems to be keeping score on the number of suicides, but before they occur.

Another lead to the source of the suicides comes with the discovery of a white sports bag near the scene at Shinjuku station. The contents of the bag are a roll of stitched together patches of skin, each about the size of a packet of cigarettes, which are shown in grisly detail. The medical examiner informs the police that there around 100 pieces of skin making up the roll, and each patch comes from a different person. Only some of these patches come from the body parts from the mass suicide at the station, meaning that there are a multitude of individual's walking around with skin missing. The police now have a race to find out who all these patches belong to before another mass suicide takes place.

So far so straight forward right? Not so fast, for Suicide Club begins to take some increasingly disconcerting and bizarre turns. These include the freaky happenings at the world's most deserted Hospital, or the students who follow one another off their school building in a game of dare that goes tragically wrong. Then there are the bizarre phone calls from children asking existential questions, secret messages in band photographs, the posing of self-styled 'Charles Manson of the Information Age' Genesis in the dubiously titled Pleasure Room - all add up to a film out of the ordinary.

This is largely a downbeat film with darkly comic moments, and the personalities reflect this. While they are not developed very deeply, each character seem to have the weight of the world on their shoulders, with the disconcerting exception of those who kill themselves, who display such looks of gleeful release that one wonders if they are the fortunate ones. The amazing montage of suicides illustrates this point, where the "victims" all have such looks of blissful liberation. Contrast this with Ryo Ishibashi as the cop who struggles with the investigation and what this uncovers particularly exemplifies the desolate attitude of those who struggle through life. The main characters all have such looks of world-weariness you wonder how on earth they decide to get up each morning. Bleak stuff indeed.