Review: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

Dir. Sion Sono (2013)

The following review contains minor spoilers.

Why don’t you play in hell, well that sounds a little aggressive right? First off, to answer the question, Should you see why don’t you play in hell? The answer is probably going to be no. UNLESS. You happen to be a mega-cinema nerd who loves comedies with buckets of blood and uncomfortable satire that cuts to the bone (often literally).

The film sets an odd tone from the very first few scenes, a young girl shills toothpaste in a commercial while singing a cute, catchy song. A group of preteen filmmakers film a local gang’s tussle while shouting acting directions at them, much to their confusion. These first couple scenes hit the bell of tonal juxtaposition with a sledgehammer. The rest of the movie rides this exaggerated, joyful, violent note right up until the closing credits. Our protagonists are filmmakers who cannot tell fiction from reality, which turns their craft into a slightly sickening, yet giddy, voyeurism.

Speaking of sickening, giddy voyeurism...the viewer’s going to be feeling this way frequently while participating in the story by watching it. Sion Sono walks a very fine line by crafting a narrative which wildly celebrates the passion of film-making while also calling it out as being kind of a pathetic goal at the same time. It’s a loving ribbing of the art-form and it’s artists; if by loving you mean cocaine coated and by ribbing you mean a chainsaw to the face. That’s not to mean the story has the snarky, condescending hipster attitude of a Coen brother film, it fully celebrates everything it destroys, drinking the blood of it’s victims to gain their power.

“Why don’t you play in hell” launches a full scale assault on the very idea that obsession, nostalgia, and fanboy-ism are in any way admirable qualities. Every single character has a heightened fixation of some kind. The yakuza boss who thinks he’d be a better father for an adorable girl than her current one. The would be director who is obsessed with cinema yet has never finished a single film. The hapless romantic fixated on the woman of his dreams whose father is dead set on killing him. Every character is driven by acute obsession or nostalgia and every character is utterly pathetic as a result. This isn’t to say that they’re uninteresting or saddening to watch, no, this movie is laugh out loud funny and delights in its characters while also capturing their own pitiful self-destruction. Their fanboy-level focus on one thing strips them from reality, like paint thinner splashed on a masterpiece. In Sion Sono’s world, reality cannot compete with their fantasies. Obsession, nostalgia, and living in their own fantasy world, leads to utter destruction.

Stripped down, the movie works as both a scathing condemnation of and glittery celebration of the mere concept of pop culture as a shallow, self-destructive, and pathetic drug whose participants willingly strip themselves away from everything real in a desperate attempt to inject some kind of passion into what would probably simply be a white-bread, lackluster life. Now, that sounds a little harsh. That sounds a little harsh because it IS harsh. Despite this bitter pill, Siono’s film never suggests we pity the pathetic character’s camping out in front of the cinema weeks before the next marvel/star wars/transformers sequel/spin off/remake comes out. The film suggests these characters are joyful in their own pathetic decay and we, as their audience, shouldn’t pity them, but instead, should delight in the absurdist fun they’re having DESPITE their pathetic decay!

As you may have guessed, this is NOT a movie everyone’s going to enjoy. Wildly gory, directly confrontational, aggressively cheerful, and oddly charming, “Why Don’t You Play in Hell” is hands down the most entertaining act of self-mutilation put to film. Because, you get the sense while watching, the message isn’t a weapon Sion Sono is wielding against hapless convention nerds. No. This is a movie Sion Sono made to call out Sion Sono. And if you’re the right kind of insane, as I consider myself to be, this is a movie with a message that punches you in the gut while clapping you on the back. When it’s over, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be grinning from ear to ear.

-Josh Evans