Suicide Room

If there is one thing that I can say after watching Suicide Room (Polish: Sala Samobójców), it's that if it's your type of film, you will like it. If it isn't, then it's better to stay away.

Dominik is a teen with wealthy parents. He has his share of friends, but after a series of events with a classmate at a party, he is bullied and accused of being gay. He takes this rather hard and sinks into depression. During his depression he comes across an online community whose members are into self harm and suicide. He manages to form a bond with one person in particular, Sylwia, the leader of the group.

It's easy to judge Dominik has having overacted to his predicament. It's easy to judge him as overly sensitive, bratty and foolish in his subsequent actions with himself and his parents. But we aren't in his shoes. Although I can empathize to a certain extent to his character, I can never know exactly how he feels. We all face our personal demons, and sometimes the weight is too much for any single one of us to bear. It is with the support of others that we overcome them.

The problem is, he found the wrong person. I find Sylwia to be hard to empathize with at all; to me she seems like a selfish person who thinks the world revolves around her. It affected my interpretation of the last few scenes, where I interpreted her reaction to the events that transpired to be because of her continued inability to kill herself. There is a romance attempted here, but I see it as one sided, and thus more tragic than what it intended to portray. If it were really mutual, it's horribly unhealthy. The parents are not much help either. Although overall they are well meaning, their other motivations stem from their own welfare than for their son's.

The plot also suffers from a tendency to meander. The whole thing about Dominik being persecuted as gay becomes irrelevant halfway into the picture and focuses on this "romantic" plot that I find hard to swallow. We never learn how he deals (or doesn't deal) with his sexual orientation; that would probably have made a better film. The film never touches on it again. The other members of the Suicide Room are nicely detailed in 3DCG, but these scenes are superfluous at best, and even then little is made of their development as a family. The whole romantic scene with the random Japanese song is a WTF moment.

The best one could hope at the end of the film is that some sort of positive change happened with all the characters involved, although depending on your interpretation, that may not be the case. In the end it's an OK film, but one that feels uneven and unpolished\.