It's actually rather hard to understand "Suicide Club" in part because there's no real reason for what happens in it. There's no real conclusion or solution to it and nothing is solved. And part of that is because we're seeing it through Western eyes.
Japan is... odd. Not in a bad way but in a way that we can see how a culture different to our own has evolved. One that even myself, who lived there for 10 years, still doesn't quite understand. You really need to live there and grow up in that society to begin to get what is going on in this movie.
The movie opens on a train station in Tokyo where a group of high school girls have gathered. At the right time they all hold hands and as one jump onto the tracks as the express train rolls by. This is of course national news and the police are called in to investigate. There they discover a bag with a roll of human skin stitched together. It's determined that this came from the girls. Each one, for some unknown reason, had a strip of skin removed and stitched together into a large roll. The next day a group of students eating lunch on the rooftop of their school jump to their deaths. The day after that suicides are starting to pop up all over Japan all seemingly tied into the same thing.
As the police investigate, more suicides occur and it's becoming a bit of an epidemic. There's seemingly ties to a visual kei musical group and a young idol group called "Dessert". In this it mimics a series of suicides that occurred after people listened to the song "Gloomy Sunday" by Billie Holiday, a song which is supposedly cursed.
Unfortunately, as stated earlier, there's no solution to why all these people were killing themselves. Some say it's due to the music and how the group Dessert pushed people to do so. At one point somebody notices that on one of their posters each member has certain fingers showing. The numbers, when put onto a phone, spell out "suicide". But there's nothing in their music that seems to lead people to want to kill themselves.
The director, Sion Sono, has stated that this movie is a satire of not only the entertainment industry and how we absorb pop culture. But also it's a commentary on Japanese youth and their willingness to throw themselves into their passions. He's mentioned that maybe he didn't explain this well enough so that non-Japanese people could understand it but does say that the ambiguity of the whole thing is what makes it so compelling.
It's a flawed movie but again maybe that's only because we're not seeing it as he envisioned. Anybody who likes Japanese New Wave cinema needs to give it a watch. It's interesting but it might take a couple viewings for it to make any kind of sense to you.
Japan is... odd. Not in a bad way but in a way that we can see how a culture different to our own has evolved. One that even myself, who lived there for 10 years, still doesn't quite understand. You really need to live there and grow up in that society to begin to get what is going on in this movie.
The movie opens on a train station in Tokyo where a group of high school girls have gathered. At the right time they all hold hands and as one jump onto the tracks as the express train rolls by. This is of course national news and the police are called in to investigate. There they discover a bag with a roll of human skin stitched together. It's determined that this came from the girls. Each one, for some unknown reason, had a strip of skin removed and stitched together into a large roll. The next day a group of students eating lunch on the rooftop of their school jump to their deaths. The day after that suicides are starting to pop up all over Japan all seemingly tied into the same thing.
As the police investigate, more suicides occur and it's becoming a bit of an epidemic. There's seemingly ties to a visual kei musical group and a young idol group called "Dessert". In this it mimics a series of suicides that occurred after people listened to the song "Gloomy Sunday" by Billie Holiday, a song which is supposedly cursed.
Unfortunately, as stated earlier, there's no solution to why all these people were killing themselves. Some say it's due to the music and how the group Dessert pushed people to do so. At one point somebody notices that on one of their posters each member has certain fingers showing. The numbers, when put onto a phone, spell out "suicide". But there's nothing in their music that seems to lead people to want to kill themselves.
The director, Sion Sono, has stated that this movie is a satire of not only the entertainment industry and how we absorb pop culture. But also it's a commentary on Japanese youth and their willingness to throw themselves into their passions. He's mentioned that maybe he didn't explain this well enough so that non-Japanese people could understand it but does say that the ambiguity of the whole thing is what makes it so compelling.
It's a flawed movie but again maybe that's only because we're not seeing it as he envisioned. Anybody who likes Japanese New Wave cinema needs to give it a watch. It's interesting but it might take a couple viewings for it to make any kind of sense to you.