Suicide Club / Suicide Circle / Jisatsu sakuru (2001)

As a sort of knock-off of Cure, Suicide Club follows a series of inexplicable deaths investigated by a detective who can find no connections between them, but ups the ante in terms of gore, confusion, and distractions.

The opening is as shocking as any you are likely to find anywhere, as groups of schoolgirls in their cute little uniforms come together on a train station platform, join hands, and all 54 of them jump in front of the incoming train. Adding a touch of Takashi Miike, writer/director Sion Sono shows us crushed heads exploding, blood splashing on the train windows, crowds covered in blood, and bits of body parts in the chaos. Later the police find bags of human skin sewn together in strips, each segment from a different person. Detective Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi) wants to investigate further, but the bosses want to write it off as an accident, even after another group of students on their break leap off their school building. Eventually, the deaths keep piling up until Kuroda’s own family dies and he kills himself, at which point the bosses admit there is a crime going on here.

As in Cure, the malevolence seems to just be in the air, but we have turned the century and have two new forces “in the air,” the internet and the teeny-girl pop group all over the radio and TV music videos. Most of the deaths that we see on camera occur while a group called Dessert* are singing a song called “Mail Me,” and the suicides end when the group makes its farewell performance. There is also a web site that predicts the deaths just before they occur, through posting of lines of dots, red for female, white for male. The police never manage to track down the source of these dots, nor explain how the poster either gets the skin or controls his victims.

Also as in Cure, there is an existential question asked. Kuroda often gets a phone call from a childish voice asking if he is connected to himself. Later, the fiancée of one of the victims is confronted by a group of children who ask her the same question. How this question connects to the suicides, however, does not seem clear; after all, the suicides are often in groups.

None of this is helped by a long detour into the kidnapping and murder of two young women who are also tracking the red dots on the web by a gang led by “Genesis,” a bleached blonde rocker played by the Japanese rocker known as Rolly. He wants the publicity of an arrest as the leader of the Suicide Club, but he is really into more direct murder, from little animals in sacks that he stomps to death to the young kidnapped women who are raped and stabbed by his followers while he plays guitar and sings.

It may be pointless to read too much into this, as Sono is obviously more interested in the shock and gore than in the philosophical and psychological questions it plays with. Nevertheless, it seems symptomatic of something happening in Japanese society as reflected in other movies of the time. Suicide Club depicts a new fear running through society, a fear of the young, particularly young women. To a considerable degree, Japanese horror had always been built around a fear of women and the black cat spirit woman seeking revenge seemed to never go away. There had been monster movies, of course, such as Godzilla, and later there were alien invaders, but after only a few movies Godzilla had been converted into a kind of super-hero who re-appeared when needed to save Japan from some other monster.  By the turn of the century we began seeing movies about an inexplicable and incomprehensible youth culture that seemed to be actively malevolent, most famously depicted in Battle Royale.

Americans, of course, had been struggling with “youth culture” as distinct from the general social culture since Elvis and the Beatles, with new changes of attitude and new fears expressed by authorities roughly every twenty years. In Japan, at least as reflected in the movies, this was initially seen as a struggle between “old” and “new” Japan. By the nineties, the “new Japan” had won, so now a modern, prosperous, and somewhat Americanized society could see youth culture in a different light, as something Other. This was especially true of young women, who even after reaching adulthood were rejecting many of the traditional female roles in the home, with the declining birth rate in particular becoming a national political issue.

This is not to suggest that Sono is making a political statement of some kind. The girls who kill themselves are not trying to avoid stay-at-home marriage with children in their future; in the two mass episodes we see, they kill themselves apparently because it might be “fun.” But it is striking that Kuroda’s phone calls, the signals given to many of the suicides, and the final confrontation with the surviving fiancée are all initiated by actual children, most but not all of them female. They may be the voice of sanity in an increasingly insane world – “Are you connected to yourself?” – or they may be a voice of malevolence that will eventually destroy those who do not heed their message properly.

This is probably too much thought given to a movie that seems not to have been made with much thought. Sono uses some of the traditional horror effects, such as dark hallways, lights that turn on and off for no reason, people who disappear and suddenly reappear, and the Genesis segment seems to exist purely for the ickiness of the scenes (though the rapes and murders occur inside sacks, so there is no nudity or sexual titillation). Though it bears an obvious relation to Cure, it is not made with the same care, precision, or artistry. Still, horror films have a habit of saying far more than the makers intended.

*As far as I can find, Dessert existed only for the sake of this movie; however, less than a year later another girl group called SweetS appeared in the recording industry. The girls in Dessert are girls, all five apparently less than thirteen, who sing in unison, and what they do can hardly be called choreography. “Mail Me” itself is catchy and sung pretty much in tune.