Review: Jisatsu sâkuru [Suicide Club] (2001)
A gaggle of chattering schoolgirls are making their way to the edge of a train platform. They join hands, and as the train pulls into the station, all 54 of the uniformed waifs jump in unison onto the tracks.
What follows is pure carnage. Heads are flattened, blood sprays and within a few seconds it hits you: this is going to bit a sick, twisted blood-fest. Yay!
Suicide Club spirals into one gory and confusing death-scene after another, as a string of apparently unrelated suicides baffle the police. At each crime scene, they find a bag, in which rolls of human skin have been stitched together. As the story unfolds, detectives begin to suspect that the skin was removed from the suicide victims before the suicide.
The detectives, middle aged family man Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi), and his partner, Shibu (Masatoshi Nagase) begin to piece together clues that lead them to believe that the suicides are linked to a website that predicts the suicides before they happen. They are aided in their investigation by a character that chooses to be referred to as “The Bat”.
As the eccentric characters and threads of the story begin to finally merge together, we’re left with an appreciation for the imaginative ways you can make the audience cringe (small animals getting trampled, a woman hacking off her own fingers with a kitchen knife, the removal of skin with a lathe) but left confused by the overly complicated story.
The ending, particularly, feels like a bit of a con. So, the best you can come away with is that if you want to feel faint and you like your cinema nuke-dog making its way back up your gullet, the creative use of DIY tools and the “thud” sounds generated by falling bodies should be right up your alley.
As we, along with the film’s odd characters, attempt to make sense of the seemingly random annihilation, you get the feeling that director Sion Sono is trying to deliver a message about disconnected youth, technology and modern commercialism, but it never quite hits its mark.
If you don’t mind shaking your head and going “huh?”, and revel in stomach-churning effects, grab the DVD.
- Eliza Dashwood @cityferret
