Thursday, 14 August 2014

Suicide Club



It sucks. The premise is interesting at least, seemingly offering a creepy mystery, but then the movie chooses not to make proper use of it. Instead you have an oddly paced, disappointingly sombre and dull J-horror offering that frustrates as it constantly threatens to become interesting but never makes it there. The characters are dull and lifeless, meaning you never care either way. The initially creepy atmosphere is dragged out and then starts to turn outright silly while the movie continues to take itself stone cold seriously. It also never leads anywhere, just plodding along until it eventually stops.

Director Sion Sono is a weird guy. I’ve reviewed a film of his before, the ridiculous ‘Why Don’t You Play in Hell’, and I also enjoyed the oddness of his four hour epic ‘Love Selection’. But I really couldn’t get into ‘Suicide Club’. I just didn’t enjoy it.


Fifty cheerful Japanese schoolgirls commit mass suicide by throwing themselves in front of a moving subway train, causing widespread panic and a sudden suicide epidemic across the country. Left at the scene, and at every other scene of such significance, is a bloodied bag containing a rolled up length of stitched-together human skin taken from the victims before their deaths.

A mysterious website which keeps a tally of the suicides by gender (though the tally increases before the suicides), small children who start calling the police and giving them cryptic warnings and a violent glam rocker/cult leader named Genesis all seem linked to the ‘Suicide Club’. Seemingly connected to all of this is the cheerful pop band ‘Dessart’. The bewildered police, a hacker named the Bat and a schoolgirl all get caught up in the mystery behind the suicides.

Now all of this sounds interesting, but never manages to actually be interesting. It’s never given adequate treatment, most of it being odd sort of details that don’t add anything. It’s all sort of a dull mess, with every new revelation fizzling out as the movie refuses to delve deeper.

The movie’s pacing is also off. After the gory opening subway scene, there’s an oddly prolonged, entirely unrelated scene in a hospital that attempts to build atmosphere but just slows the movie down suddenly. And it continues like this for most of the movie actually – there’ll be an interesting, intriguing scene that’ll push the story forward, followed by a long sequence of nothing important (usually leading up to a suicide). The slow building atmosphere doesn’t do much, especially towards the end when things get downright silly. But the movie refuses to budge from its squalid pace, dragging on in this fashion, getting weirder (but never interesting) as it trudges on to a non-ending that doesn’t satisfy.

It’s really hard to care about what’s going on, as we aren’t given any characters worth caring about. None of them have any depth, and they only get given occasional focus. The movie spends much more time showing slow burn scenes of people randomly killing themselves. The few main characters mostly don’t have anything going on (especially the schoolgirl), and most of them kill themselves anyway. I guess one could argue that, thematically, it’s about the real-life unexplained high suicide rate in Japan, but that feels like a copout.  
It’s never as interesting or entertaining as its premise threatens to be. Part of the reason is the really dull and serious tone it takes, even when ridiculous things are happening. Genesis hangs out in an abandoned bowling alley with large sacks full of writhing animals and girls he and his gang routinely murder. Yet it’s never creepy or ridiculous enough to be entertaining. The cryptic children talk in nonsense riddles and speech, doing nothing more than being clichés, and a lot of the supposedly ‘chilling’ imagery is nonsense.

                                         
It’s often downright silly (everything about Genesis), but it takes itself so seriously there’s no fun to be had. It’s too silly to take seriously, and too serious to be fun. It just sort of exists in that vague middle space. The effects all look ridiculously fake, with CGI nonsense for most of the explosive gore, and large sprays of fake blood gushing around in the bigger scenes. The filmmaking is also quite simple for the most part, almost made-for-TV at times (everything in the hospital could pass for something shot for a TV drama).
At the end, like most J-Horror, the mystery goes largely unresolved. The best J-Horror has always had a vein of ambiguity and mystery, where not everything is explained. But while this works in adding to the creepiness of many J-horror classics, like The Ring or The Grudge, here it just ends things unsatisfactorily. The movie just sort of finishes at that point, with most of the characters dead, the mystery continuing and the audience feeling apathy. It doesn’t even have a final scare, it just ends vaguely.

                                              
Suicide Club isn’t worth it. It has an interesting premise that it never capitalises on, being a disappointing, meandering slog of nonsense and frustration as good ideas go squandered. Don't bother. If you want a creepy J horror movie that’s actually good, there are plenty of better titles to check out, like the Ring, the Grudge, One Missed Call and the Eye (all of which have received American remakes btw).  

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