(Hannah Shaw-Williams)įollowing closely on the heels of "Memento," which was released a couple of years earlier, "Irreversible" is similarly structured with its scenes shown in reverse chronological order. Who is leaving grisly rolls of stitched-together human skin at the scenes of mass suicides? Did the suicide victims consciously choose to die, or were they psychologically manipulated? Are the gang of glam-rock sociopaths that live in a run-down bowling alley responsible for the deaths, or are they simply a red herring? Ultimately, "Suicide Club" offers no easy answers. In between these vignettes of violence, "Suicide Club" continually keeps the audience off-balance and guessing right up until the end. It's an odd mix of the macabre and the cartoonish as the girls' bodies are shown being crushed under the train and giant waves of blood splash the gathered commuters. In the opening sequence of "Suicide Club," 54 schoolgirls line up on a train platform, holding hands, and collectively jump in front of a train. The film follows a group of police officers and a curious hacker who investigate a series of violent suicides that are somehow connected to a mysterious website full of colored circles. "Suicide Club" is as bizarre and hard to pin down as it is disturbing, which is perhaps why it never reached the same heights of popularity as either of the aforementioned films. But it's not entirely the violence that viewers are truly upset with it's their own inability to look away. Ichi himself gains sexual gratification from killing (though he's a pawn in several senses), and his nemesis carries snake-like slits extending from his mouth - the business of these men is violence, through and through. A sex worker is mutilated before her death. An interrogation scene has its victim tormented with boiling tempura oil and his cheek sewn through. He seems to be one of the few filmmakers working who has no problem translating brutalities in manga form (which has considerably different leeways than feature films do) to the screen, carrying tongue mutilations and mid-air suspension tortures from page to screen without batting an eyelash (to the disgust of audiences in 2001 and today). Like his contemporaries Sion Sono ("Suicide Club") and Kinji Fukasaku ("Battle Royale"), Miike was more interested in criminal underbellies and poking at taboos.
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