Suicide Club (自殺サークル）

(2002) Directed by Sion Sono. Distributed by TLA Releasing.

23 June 2007

I fell quickly in love with this grim flick that takes the clichés of Japanese horror cinema and turns them into something touching and surreal. The plot deals with a rash of unexplained suicides in Japan. The suicides have a cultish aspect: for instance, a group of uniformed schoolgirls line up on a train platform, join hands, and chant “one two three,” then throw themselves together in the path of an oncoming train. Furthermore, some of the suicides have identical wounds, rectangles of flesh sliced away.
An investigator following up on the suicides takes a soulful look around himself on a subway train and sees a pervasive melancholy in his fellow travelers. Soon after, he begins receiving ominous phonecalls from a child who seems to know something about the alleged suicide club. These phonecalls are genuinely creepy because of the coldness in the child’s voice and the disconcerting, unexplained cough that happens after every puzzling statement the child makes. The phonecalls seem to imply that suicide is preferable to life because only in suicide can one affirm one’s connection to oneself. Later, we are treated to a look at a strange conspiracy of children who seem to be at the root of the suicides. In an unforgettable scene, the children enter a long hallway infused with pink light. Chirping baby chicks dart around the floor of the hallway, and a man in a black mask prepares a carpenter’s tool to slice rectangles of flesh from the backs of the children’s victims.
There is a sequel to this movie which explains some of its mysteries, but the piece stands alone as sad, beautiful enigma.