Suicide Club

B+

Directed by Sion Sono

Sion Sono, a Fantasia regular and director of such weirdness as "Strange Circus" and "Hair Extensions" has built his career on producing odd and unsettling work while at the same time seeming to willfully court a reputation as a shock director. The controversial moves that Sono makes often benefit and suffer simultaneously from his efforts to shock and awe his audience, and "Suicide Club," his best known and most succesful work, is no exception.

"Suicide Club" opens with a gaggle of teenage schoolgirls happily filling towards a busy subway platform in Tokyo, clasping hands, and throwing themselves en masse in front of a moving train, sending bodies parts and blood spatter all over horrified onlookers. This grisly act of collective suicide, rather than an isolated act, appears to be part of a larger wave of suicides gripping Japan, and local detective Kuroda attempts to tackle the case. As the case unfolds, however, Kuroda realizes he may be up against something bigger than a simple fad and that anyone, even Kuroda himself, can become a victim. (GASP!)

The above summary does not at all do justice to Sono's complex plot, which actually completely shifts narrative point of view midway through the film, a feat I found completely brilliant and unsettling. Suffice it to say, Sono is a smart guy and he unleashes the full power of his intellect in creating a storyline that is multilayered and complex, acting as both a gross out horror film, critique of pop culture and a barb directed at Japan's apathetic youth. Surprisingly, Sono is able toconstruct a movie that does all of these things quite well and with style left to burn. My biggest gripe with "Suicide Club," however, is that it does eventually get partially lost in the murk of Sono's own intelligence and the film at times seems to suffer from the weight of its own ambitions. Sono, as already mentioned, is a smart guy and seems to know this full well, which is both beneficial and detrimental at the same time to "Suicide Club." Indeed, although Sono never drifts into the Charlie Kaufman zone of extreme navel gazing where the film becomes purely a vehicle to advertise the filmmakers superior intellect, he does still struggle with bouts of cinematic hubris. Despite this, "Suicide Club" is still a wildly entertaining and completely original work which well deserves the cult like status it currently enjoys.