| Rating: | ★★★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Horror |
Instead of a quote, I will start with a note. The Japanese language is syllabic, rather than letter-based, like English. This means that a lot of the time, when they go to name something, if they're using a word which derives originally from English, they spell it phonetically, which sometimes looks odd. The trick is, it always sounds fairly similar to its English origin if you actually say it out loud, which makes it easy to tell what word they were using. The American release of Suicide Circle didn't bother to understand this, and called the movie "Suicide CLUB" which is just wrong. The original title of this movie is "Jisatsu saakuru" which - say it - is CIRCLE.
Enough of the mini-rant; I just hate it when someone ignores something that's staring them right in the friggin' face, that's all.
Now, before I begin my discussion of this movie, I want you to be aware in advance that I am going to link images from this movie. I am linking them, rather than embedding them, because this movie is EXTREMELY gory, and some of you might just not want to see the actual images I'm discussing.
First things first. You will need to watch this movie twice, at least; once to go "OMGWTF!?!" and then let it sit for a couple of days, and then again to really enjoy it. The reason for this is because the movie is - subtle - about some of the things it tries to get across, and it may take more than one viewing to really get the point ; when I first watched it, my reaction was "OMGWTF!?!" and then about 2 days later, I began to realize that it was, in fact, a damned impressive movie.
The movie starts off with a shot that is, and should be, legend. A train station, filled with people, is waiting for the Tokyo Express train to pass through. Express trains don't stop; they fly right through. As the train approaches, 54 high school girls, in uniform, filter into the station, move to the platform, and line up across its edge. They clasp each others' hands; chant in unison "one... two... three!" and THROW THEMSELVES UNDER THE TRAIN. The train blows a literal tidal wave of gore across the station. In the resulting hysteria, someone who is never revealed deposits a white gym bag in the station, which is later found to contain a roll made up of 200 strips of human skin - from different people - sewn neatly together, end-to-end.
The detectives investigating don't even believe this is happening; the girls are from 18 different high schools and presumably didn't even know each other. However, this quickly becomes a trend; a nurse on night shift at a hospital tells a security guard she will talk to him later, steps up, and throws herself right out of a window to her death; another group of high school kids, joking around about a "suicide club" throw themselves - in nearly identical fashion to the train incident - off the roof of their school building; a performer stabs himself in the throat in front, so to speak, of a live studio audience; four women hang themselves as a group; and a news report is read in the background later on describing the apparent suicide of 200 more people who threw themselves off a castle in the country.
At every turn, Director Sono Shion takes us to a more extreme place than we expected. The infamous radish scene is a perfect example. Nearly every horror movie has an obligatory scene where someone is slicing a vegetable or other food item, and cuts their finger. Sono doesn't settle for the cheap shot, though; when his character slices, she takes her finger THE FUCK OFF. Then she cuts again, removing the rest of that finger and part of the next, then again, cutting her hand in half, then again, and again, and again, all the while smiling faintly, as if at a joke we cannot hear, all the while in full view of her daughter, who is maybe 5.
There appears to be no connection amongst the suicides, except that more of the white gym bags show up, with identical contents. The police are mystified. The discovery of a website that appears to be predicting the suicides doesn't help at all.
Now, to Western viewers, is the part where the director suddenly smokes a huge pipe full of crack and just goes batshiat crazy. A Japanese version of Frank N. Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show shows up and does a musical number - no, I'm not kidding - and the movie quickly concludes with a song by a teenybopper pop girl group whose name changes several times during the movie, advising us to become "connected to ourselves."
I realize you're all going "and you said this movie was GOOD?!?"
But, in fact, it is. Not because of the staggering gore and brutality evident in the movie - after the second batch of highschoolers die, the cops find an ear hanging from a ledge, where one of the kids hit their head on the way down, and the investigator gets a stick, yells "here comes an ear" and flips it off the ledge to fall at the feet of the medical examiners - but because of the point those things are getting across.
Japanese society is so highly industrialized, and so highly focused on work to the exclusion of anything else, that many Japanese are feeling increasingly alienated from their fellow humans. Suicide rates are very high, and the movie is not only pointing this out but in fact demonstrating the very factors that create this environment - the disillusionment, alienation, depression, hopelessness, and isolation.
I admit; I still think the Rocky Horror Guy was a bit much, but after thinking about it for a couple of days, and letting the movie kinda soak in, I am convinced that this was one of the better J-horror movies I've seen. Not on a par with Kairo, but then, what is?
