Suicide Club (film)
2001 film by Sion Sono

Suicide Club is a 2001 Japanese independent horror film written and directed by Sion Sono. It stars Ryō Ishibashi, Masatoshi Nagase, Akaji Maro, Saya Hagiwara, Yoko Kamon, Rolly, Hideo Sako, Kimiko Yo, Mika Kikuchi, So Matsumoto, and Takashi Nomura. The film explores a wave of seemingly unconnected suicides across Japan and the efforts of the police to determine the reasons behind them.
Suicide Club premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival on October 29, 2001, and was released in Japan on March 9, 2002. It was shown at numerous global film festivals and won the Jury Prize for Most Ground-Breaking Film at the 2003 Fantasia Festival. It has since developed a significant cult following.
Plot
On May 27, 54 teenage girls commit a mass suicide in Tokyo by jumping in front of an oncoming train. Shortly after, at a hospital, two nurses jump out of a window. At both locations, rolls of skin are found, matching the skin removed from the bodies of the dead. Detectives Kuroda, Shibusawa, and Murata are notified by a hacker named Kiyoko of a website called Haikyo ("Ruins"), which displays a red circle for each female suicide victim and a white one for each male.
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This entry incorporates text from “Suicide Club (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.