In my quest to find a decent horror movie to review or analyze for the Youtube Channel, my husband and I sit, when we can, and watch horror movies periodically.
We came across Suicide Club (2017) on Amazon Prime earlier today and figured if anything the premise had some promise.
“Locked in her flat for several years, a reclusive young woman stumbles upon a mysterious web community. According to an urban myth, the Suicide Club grants death to those wishing for it. Unless these “cyber suicides” are actually murders.” – IMDB
Sound interesting? That’s what we thought too.
The reality, however, is something else entirely.
Directed and written by Maximilian von Vier (The Host [2011]), Suicide Club (2017), unlike its synopsis, doesn’t seem to deal too much with the horror of its subject matter.
With a recluse in Liz (played by Klariza Clayton), the movie is hinged to one apartment, and despite an interesting opening scene of Liz attempting to commit suicide and failing, Suicide Club fails to live up to the hope inspired by its title.
The “club” in question is entirely online and can be visited by a determined search on the dark web. Though I could believe Liz’s estrangement to the outside world in the beginning due to her reasonings (told at the tail end of the movie), the last few moments of the movie make her seem less and less like a grounded character who behaves and acts realistically, and more like an archetype of an action movie. She becomes a heroine forced to overcome her inner demons to breach the outside world and both save her love interest and overthrow the club (whose rules are said to kill or be killed throughout the entire movie).
And that’s the very issue I have with this film, is the confusion about the club’s goals at every turn Liz displays, despite glaringly red letters against a black screen that tell her repeatedly to enter someone’s name to be killed or BE KILLED herself.
Yet even at the end of the film, just before the denouement, she is awestruck at the rules, and (despite having played the game already and having already used the site to kill someone she deemed deplorable) she continues to express confusion until suddenly she has the realization she needs — that she has to kill someone else and record it in order to stop the club from killing her.
Though how she came to that conclusion, I’m not entirely sure because for the entire movie the premise is to enter someone’s name into the site and it’s inferred that THAT is how you participate, by sending the killers to kill for you. How she got to the fact she’d need to actually kill someone is never really explained, only gleamed through Liz sporadically with an “I have to kill someone else.”
And the ending is full of typical action sequence rigmarole that doesn’t really fit the movie’s theme. (This isn’t a horror movie, it’s a thriller akin to a drama.) She goes to save her love interest like previously stated, overcomes the weirdo photographer’s strength (even though he’s killed many girls before her), saves the love interest, overtakes the anonymous group of suicide-killers with the love interest’s help, and deletes the Suicide Club off the web (but not before sending an empowering message of love and hope before doing so.
It’s a movie that could’ve been good just as a drama or a thriller, but the fact that it’s marketed as a horror (at least on Prime), does it a disservice.
Movie Rating: 4/10
for odd dialogue choices, character actions, and convenient plot placements throughout.
Monster Rating: 3/10
I see where they were trying to go with the “suicide isn’t the answer” story, but the message could’ve been delivered much better, and the Monster: “Battling Your Demons,” could have been portrayed as much better. It was like this wanted to be an introspective drama but it failed by making it about the characters around the main, and her strange actions done only to further the plot.
Have you seen Suicide Club (2017)? Have a different opinion? Let us know in the comments below!