Suicide Circle

What the?!?


The thought that book-ended my viewing experience of Suicide Circle.

From the onset, I realized Suicide Circle was a narrative that should not be taken on face value, one that invited pondering, contemplation, reflection, promising a little gem of existential insight, but boy was I wrong. Suicide Circle's episodic and barely coherent narrative presents a style that says quite clearly: "I am a film that wishes you to think! Think about what I have to say! Do not settle for what I show you!" ... but it is precisely this that gets in the way.

For a film to knowingly employ such a style of presentation presupposes that it has a message, a core truth that upon rigorous reflection of the viewer the film will finally award. So it is exactly this spark of truth, this promised insight, that I was aiming for, rather more aptly wading thick contemplating waters for, but alas it was nowhere to be found.

The film aims its message gun at so many targets--the ever-increasing postmodern dilemma of the isolation of man in a sea of men, the lost connection between man and himself, and the presentation of a source most unlikely for wisdom and insight. It aims at them and so many more, pulls the trigger, has bullets flying towards them, only to have them all lose momentum halfway to the target board, falling sadly to the ground after letting gravity pull it down. I personally believe this is what happened with Suicide Circle. It was so promising in that the film was able to lightly touch upon those subjects through the introduction of numerous characters (who in themselves cannot be considered protagonists for the very lack of antagonists in the film, quite postmodern eh?), making the audience anticipate how all these will come together to pull out one giant truth, or, in the least, nuggets of truths. What is served up finally, after the credits roll and the ridiculous J-pop song performed by those ominous children on television, is a big smoking bowl of nothing. Absolutely nothing!

Now some have opined that this nothing, this non-message, is precisely what the film intended, to think for thinking's sake. I find this explanation probable but problematic in that to think for thinking's sake or to do things at all just for the sake of doing them is rather masturbatory in nature, a pattern I am personally wary of because of the lack of direction another activity could have yeilded. To be assaulted by those images, haunted by those ambiguous plot ends, and yet end up with nothing is a waste of time. To have been forced to move only to find out in the end that you haven't moved at all is simply absurd--a thought I find usually accompanying other postmodern films (or films that are feigning to be postmodern).