Noriko's Dinner Table

this isn’t a prequel to suicide club, it’s also not a sequel, or even a spinoff. This feels more like suicide club was just a proof of concept, a short film that is nothing more than a rough draft, while this has always been the true story sono wanted to tell. It’s so dense and packed with meaning, that even with its 2 hour 40 minute runtime there is very little filler. i’m still not exactly sure what this movie is trying to say, at least, i can’t put it into words. But for some reason it does make sense in my head. i’m still gonna do my best tho something like this: all our relationships are superficial. Whether it’s cause of the internet, capitalism, prostitution. or just a general feeling of the modern world becoming so big that you feel like you lose control. we all want to be lions, we want to be the one in charge, to tell our own story, but we need rabbits in this world for the food chain to function. Noriko escapes her old life to start anew, thinking that finally she has found a family after all, instead of her broken one. Only to be forced into the same role she tried to escape over and over again. “are you connected to yourself? are you connected to your family?” it seems like the answer is no, except at the end, where she has accepted her role, she recognises she can’t escape it. The only one without fate or a given role is Kumiko, she has been able to shape her entire life herself because she was born in that locker. It makes her be able to pull all of the strings. Overall there’s a feeling of helplessness throughout the movie, that it seems Sono blames on many different aspects of modern society. It’s this helplessness, the inability to change one’s fate because there are so many factors and systems at play, so many circumstances outside our control, that people retreat to the role of rabbit. Letting themselves be eaten by the world.