The Movie:

With the success of Japanese suicide themed horror films such as Kyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse and Sion Sono's Suicide Club it's no surprise to see that a few knock offs have emerged. 2003's Suicide Manual borrows elements from both of these films and throws in bits and pieces of movies like Saw (the ending, specifically) and Hideo Nakata's original Ring film but ultimately loses focus around the half way mark.

Yuu (Kenji Mizuhashi) is a cameraman for a television station whose boss, Yashiro (Hideo Sakaki) wants him to shoot some footage for a documentary on suicide pacts. With the recent demise of four young people who all killed themselves in the same room, he and his co-worker/lady friend Rie (Chisato Morishita) grab a camera and head to the crime scene. After interviewing a few locals and getting little more than filler material, Rie suggests that they go to the actual apartment and take a look around to see if they can find anything of substance. When they arrive, they meet a girl named Nanami (Ayaka Maeda) who, after some convincing, talks to them about what happened. It seems that she was all ready to join her friends in death and only didn't go through with it because someone named Rickie didn't show up. She then produces a 'suicide manual' in the form of a mysterious DVD and shows it to Yuu who borrows it from her so that he can watch it. When he puts it in, he sees Rickie (Yuuko Nakamura) as she educates the viewer on various effective ways of taking ones own life.

It seems that Rickie runs a suicide pact message board on the internet and sends these strange DVDs out to anyone who she thinks is serious about killing themselves as a sort of 'how to' guide. Yuu figures this side of the investigation is far more interesting from a documentary stand point than a surface look at the events and so he starts to dig a little deeper. The further he goes with his investigation the stranger things get and soon his behavior starts to become erratic, even more so after he visits a spiritualist who explains to Yuu what happens to the souls of suicide victims.. His boss, who has always teased him, starts to get to him and it looks like Yuu is getting closer and closer to the edge...

Suicide Manual starts off reasonably well but it just flat out runs out of steam by the half way point. Director Osamu Fukutani, working off of a script he co-wrote with Hiroshi Kanno, let's the understated and quite side of the film spiral into pointlessness. At first, we think the movie is going to wind up as a reasonably smart examination of why suicide pacts exist and how this strange little subculture came to be but once the whole Rikki DVD comes into play, that's tossed out the window in favor of showing us Yuu's gradual downward spiral. This isn't to say that the film doesn't have its moments, as there are a couple of eerie and even powerful scenes here, but the movie doesn't add up to the sum of its parts and the ending feels out of place.

In terms of what works for the film, Kenji Mizuhashi is quite good in the lead. He's got a sadness to his look that really suits his character perfectly and his morose appearance fits the macabre subject matter very well. The actual footage that appears on Rikki's DVD is interesting in that, while Rikki's narration is goofy, it allows Fukutani to build some rather unsettling set pieces that stand as the highlight of the film. The movie's score, which is quite minimalist, is effective in that it, like Mizuhashi's performance, really suits the material well. It's a shame then that the film can't keep it together for the last half. Unsure if it wants to be a ghost story, a serious expose or statement on suicide pacts or simply a bleak melodrama it instead feels very contrived and it plays with too many ideas at the same time which ultimately prevents it from thoroughly exploring any of them.

The DVD

Video:

The 1.85.1 widescreen transfer is, unfortunately, not anamorphic but aside from that it doesn't look bad at all. The film was shot on digital video so you don't get the same kind of depth that you do out of 35mm film but you can't fault the transfer for that. There is some shimmering throughout but aside from that, the picture is clean, colorful and easy on the eyes. There are some really, really mild compression artifacts in some of the black spots and darker scenes in the film if you want to look for them but they're not so obvious that they're distracting. Flesh tones look lifelike and natural and for a DV production there is a fair amount of fine detail present in the picture. It's a shame that the widescreen image isn't anamorphic, but other than that this is actually a decent transfer of a low budget movie.