Meet ‘Suicide Circle’ – The Messed-Up J-Horror Movie America Didn’t Touch

Thanks to The Ring (a remake of Japan’s Ringu), J-horror was all the rage in the 2000s. With help from an obsolescing medium, VHS, Gore Verbinski started a trend once his movie made bank in 2002. Hollywood then began chasing money as they saw dollar signs in reimaginings of Ju-On/The Grudge, Dark Water, and more. 

But it was a gamble: Not everything was a success. You don’t hear very many people talk about Pulse or One Missed Call nowadays (which is for the best depending on whom you consult). These things happen as failure is always a risk, especially when a trend runs its course.

However, that doesn’t mean producers viewed potential in everything even when the iron was hot. Audition got away or was avoided altogether due to how bizarre and grim it was, yet the work by Takashi Miike didn’t suffer. His film developed a following and arguably stands in a class by itself.

The same can’t be said for the selection I want to talk about which is so obscure that I could guarantee you haven’t seen or heard of it unless you’re already steeped in the cinema of the East or somebody showed it to you.

Suicide Circle (or Club) is a 2001 noir-style thriller directed by Sion Sono in which a rash of mass suicides by young people leave police baffled. The deeper they dig, the stranger the clues become, and the less anything and everything makes sense.

Their most crucial pieces of evidence are bloody rolls of tattooed slices of human skin belonging to various victims that pop up at every scene. And there is a new scene with a fresh roll every few minutes.

It’s no exaggeration to say this film ‘goes fast and hard’ like the force of a sudden impact. From the beginning, large groups of students throw themselves in front of trains and off buildings en masse. In the second disconcerting instance, one guy lingers nervously before finally taking the plunge.

Left with no other leads, investigators get a tip from a hacker operating in a dingy closet named Kiyoko who shows them a link to a website marking the deaths with red and white dots. Someone’s keeping score and the tally grows as the plague of self-deletion grips all of Japan.

Soon, it comes home to roost for one of the lead detectives who loses his whole family to this mind virus. He then ends his existence not too long after he receives ominous phone calls. (Cue Biff because there is something very familiar about all this.)

The film takes an abrupt and bizarre U-turn when the focus shifts back to Kiyoko the hacker. Abducted by a glam rock group, she is taken to a small bowling alley lit like a discotheque where she is introduced to a weirdo rocker named Genesis.

He welcomes Kiyoko to his “pleasure room” and plays a song for an impromptu – and disquieting – jam session. While he sings in broken English “Because dead shine brightly,” a girl in a white sack is SA-ed and killed in an inversion of Miike’s dynamic from Audition. 

When Kiyoko finds a computer to commandeer and sends a distress email to the authorities, Genesis catches her but lets her send the message anyway because he is a messed up psychopath who wants to go down in history for his infamy. 

Cops arrive to arrest him, thinking they have the one responsible for the country’s mass neurosis. Media is also there to cover his apprehension so Genesis takes the opportunity to wildly mug for the cameras. He’s off the streets officially, but you have probably seen enough movies to guess that’s not where Suicide Circle ends.

No, there is yet another circle back to a character named Mitsuko who’s caught up in the furor through her dead boyfriend. She manages to figure out the crisis links back to a hitmaking J-Pop act (or idol group as they are called over there) known as Dessert.

Their posters are everywhere throughout the movie as are their songs that open and close the proceedings. You are left with the impression that they are as over as Taylor Swift, except more saccharine sweet, and less suspicious on the outside. Their members are all tweens that could be considered more harmless and above reproach than High School Musical.

However, their true purpose is sinister – kind of like Disney overall. It turns out that hand gestures and logos they use at concerts and on their merch are coded signals that spell “suicide” when cracked. What’s more, their fan club is responsible for slicing the skin off the backs of all the people who wind up dead. 

The implication is obvious to anyone familiar with Judas Priest’s legal drama. Dessert uses subliminal messaging to coerce people into offing themselves. At least, that’s what most people think they’re supposed to take away from it all. 

Suicide Circle is not the most coherent picture, and it’s not easy to explain either. Sion Sono is partly to blame for that considering how many rules of story structure he breaks. Chief complaints about his film are unanswered plot holes and the lack of an identifiable main character. 

He seemed to be more preoccupied with the visuals and scenarios, which puts the story second and leaves the whole thing ambiguous. Though there’s a message at the core, and arguably multiple, it (or they) are open to interpretation.

Sono hits at the heart of something that’s been a societal concern in Japan for a long time, going back to the feudal days when harakiri was the only recourse for dishonor. However, he also taps into a theme of the media and pop culture’s toxic influence on the masses, but he doesn’t explore it very far. 

He filled in the gaps with a prequel short called Noriko’s Dinner Table while a novel and a manga tried to translate the story more clearly. Like their predecessor, these were released in Japan, and to my knowledge there has never been an adaptation or remake anywhere else. But why, you might be asking.

Complexities reside at every level of cinema as a business and art, but my deduction is Suicide Circle remains untouched for two rather simple reasons. Its relative obscurity works against it, and some things don’t cross over well between cultures. 

You can argue Sono was ahead of his time and had a finger on the pulse of society, but that doesn’t equate to mainstream appeal. It’s bad enough that Japanese tastes don’t always overlap with American ones. Studios here typically account for that. 

Well, except for the usual suspects of A24, Neon, Lions Gate, and Blumhouse and each of them opens a new can of worms – the risk of mixed results. A temptation to water down the content could overcome the first three, but Blumhouse won’t be able to help themselves. 

Watch any of their releases this year or their remake of Martyrs for proof. They might not understand Sono’s vision and try in vain to sanitize every detail in a way that alienates fans and the director, which wouldn’t make him the first to disown work based on his own.

Heck, we can sit here and argue America never understood J-horror in the first place based on the way the fad died out – with a whimper after Rings, if not earlier. That circle is complete.

It may come around again one day when what’s old is new again, but for Suicide Circle to be the first salvo in a revival, it needs to build its following in North America.

That won’t be too hard, believe me. It’s one of those movies: once you see it, the experience never leaves you (consider yourself warned).

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