The IMDb category "horror" and the DVD cover of a girl burning herself to death might lead you to believe that "Suicide Song" is, well, a horror flick about girls burning themselves to death.
Surprisingly not so. If you're expecting something like the iconic morbid social satires like "Suicide Club" or "Battle Royale", you might wanna look elsewhere. Instead what you get here is oddly light-hearted, funny, and perhaps even delightfully cheesy, despite staying very close to its dark subject of suicide.
How does it accomplish this? First of all, it shies away from gratuitous gore. Instead of the obligatory blood & guts & creepy girls crawling on the floor mired in blood & guts, as we may have come to expect from Japanese flicks labeled "horror", most of the death scenes are handled with a tasteful cut-away to a distant shot. At first, the bloodthirsty vampires amongst us may feel cheated, but sit back & have a tomato juice instead, you'll soon realize that this is a much more poetic and artistic way of handling death.
Next I gotta mention the humor. There's some really funny stuff here, and I'm not just talking about corny sight gags. The characters are really quirky (especially the mildly psychotic ex-soldier turned magazine reporter), and their rapid-fire banter is at times reminiscent of a Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn tit-for-tat thing. Just be prepared to read subtitles fast if you don't speak Japanese.
And thirdly I was impressed by what the film had to say under the surface. Granted, I missed a lot because I was struggling to speed read the subtitles, but the film's commentary on the epidemic of suicide is pretty interesting stuff. There's a line where one character expresses how suicide comes in fads, ever since ancient times, tying it in with the appropriate modern reference to suicide bombers in the Middle East, and to blame suicide on any new phenomenon, ghosts or demons or as the case may be, a song, is foolish.
If I had to fault the film for one thing, it would be the second half when we depart from these abstract thoughts, and the story settles on a more literal plot. I suppose this is required to give the film closure, and on that level it delivers. But I would've been just as happy without the traditional buildup, climax & resolution, since the film seemed to be heading nicely in the direction of a rhetorical mind trip (like maybe 2001: A Space Odyssey) rather than a linear story (like maybe Star Wars). But overall, the balance between philosophy & story was well handled, and I think most people will enjoy this flick. As long as you're NOT expecting horror!
