When trying to make sense of this film one must consider the circumstances under which it was made and what inspired the director to do it in the first place.
Shion Sono started writing the script after a close friend of his killed himself. Nobody had any idea why he did it. He seemed perfectly OK and then one day he was dead by his own hand. There was no suicide not, no explanation, nothing.
SUICIDE CIRCLE, the film, is a cinematic meditation on the theme of suicide. Several times in the film it is mentioned how you have to be "connected" to yourself and not only to your job, your family and your other duties. There's also a reason that happy, laughing, cheerful, young, beautiful people off themselves apparently for no reason at all. Note the shots when the cop is on the subway and he looks at all those people who look dead tired and depressed. Each one of them could kill himself anytime. The end is also about this, the cop character has to give up trying to figure out who will kill himself because ultimately this is something up to the individual and outsiders can only have so much influence on it. In a way Shion Sono excuses himself from not preventing his friend's death with this ending.
The film is ambiguous in many places and does not provide any easy answers. It only gives ideas, offers perspectives, theories and hints. And that's what I like about it. Actually I watched this film for the first time only a few months after getting pretty close to ending my life myself. I thought it was a very intelligent and respectful film about the subject matter and much better than any heavy-handed, whiny, "politically correct" Hollywood film or those horrid movies of the week on TV.
Shion Sono started writing the script after a close friend of his killed himself. Nobody had any idea why he did it. He seemed perfectly OK and then one day he was dead by his own hand. There was no suicide not, no explanation, nothing.
SUICIDE CIRCLE, the film, is a cinematic meditation on the theme of suicide. Several times in the film it is mentioned how you have to be "connected" to yourself and not only to your job, your family and your other duties. There's also a reason that happy, laughing, cheerful, young, beautiful people off themselves apparently for no reason at all. Note the shots when the cop is on the subway and he looks at all those people who look dead tired and depressed. Each one of them could kill himself anytime. The end is also about this, the cop character has to give up trying to figure out who will kill himself because ultimately this is something up to the individual and outsiders can only have so much influence on it. In a way Shion Sono excuses himself from not preventing his friend's death with this ending.
The film is ambiguous in many places and does not provide any easy answers. It only gives ideas, offers perspectives, theories and hints. And that's what I like about it. Actually I watched this film for the first time only a few months after getting pretty close to ending my life myself. I thought it was a very intelligent and respectful film about the subject matter and much better than any heavy-handed, whiny, "politically correct" Hollywood film or those horrid movies of the week on TV.