Review

Maybe it's someone in the cast that's drawn you in, or the source material. Please let me articulate as clearly as I can: These are red herrings. This is an awful movie, and you should never watch it.

One need only be passingly familiar with the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson to understand the thrust of the narrative. One may not even need that much to quickly grasp a chief difficulty with 'The Suicide Club' - an issue that feels all too typical when old stories are updated to a contemporary setting. So much work is put into establishing the modern era (1988, in this instance), and introducing the characters, that it's 20 minutes before any plot shows up. And when it does, the kickoff is so clumsy and inelegant as to feel desperately forced - and even after that, it takes far longer still to actually go anywhere, to the point that one wonders if this should genuinely be called an adaptation.

The promise of the premise is all but totally undercut by the critically haphazard construction - this is, emphatically, not a good movie.

We're given snapshots of characters that would pretend to be complete dissertations on their persons, but it's all so direly thin and hollow. We're told of their backgrounds, and their exceptional knowledge, and shown the ease with which the film's story progresses to get to the heart of the adapted narrative. But it's all bereft of reason, emotion, and motivation - graceless and empty, like a recreation of an Old West town that's actually nothing but facades propped up with 2x4s. Connections between plot points, or even from scene to scene, are threadbare at best; connective tissue in character interactions is all but absent; even dialogue feels staged, inorganic, slapdash. If one had no foreknowledge whatsoever, then 'The Suicide Club' would surely feel like a tawdry jumble of directionless nothing. Having some foreknowledge, that impression isn't meaningfully improved.

I do greatly admire the wardrobe and costume design. Set design and decoration, and filming locations, are impressive in their consideration. I do appreciate, on the surface, the orchestration of some scenes, and the arrangement of some shots, but there is exasperatingly little substance behind them. I think the cast demonstrates fine acting skills, including Lenny Henry and Madeleine Potter with some swell delivery of their lines. And there are still other recognizable names and faces present. But what is the point of any of this, in a film that's otherwise such a horrid mess?

What could have been a captivating thriller is instead an agonizingly middling, unbaked sketch of a mystery. I counted a total of three instances of plot progression in these 90 minutes, and one of those was the climax. Meanwhile, throwaway bits of conversation, and many scenes scattered throughout, suggest an entirely different movie with no connection to the titular organization. Any passing moment that should be impactful is rendered wholly inert by the trash that surrounds it. I've seen some utterly terrible movies, poorly made in countless ways, but I can't recall any other title that is so barren, desolate, vacant - void of content, entertainment, meaning.

'The Suicide Club' is so ineptly written and directed, forsaking real narrative development, that if all superfluous, unnecessary material were cut - reducing the feature to a short film of perhaps 15-20 minutes in length - the result would still be just as dreadfully destitute.

This is without a doubt some of the worst dreck to which I've ever borne witness. It's not enough to say that I don't recommend watching this. I could only be satisfied by wishing 'The Suicide Club' out of existence.