The Suicide Shop

When: Tonight, 6:45

Where: Empire Capitol 6

Rating: Two stars

Don’t assume that just because it’s billed “a 3D animated musical comedy” that Patrice Leconte’s ambitious French film adapted from Jean Teule’s blackly comic novel is family fare. Quite the opposite. The animation, a blend of stylized colour, monochromatic imagery of Parisian scenes and grotesque caricatures, is stunning. But this grisly romp’s visual style is in the service of the overwrought, increasingly tiresome tale of the dark, Addams Family-type proprietors of the quaint, historic shop of the title that sells paraphernalia — guns, knives, poisons, nooses and so on — to customers from the French capital whose contemplation of suicide is graphically depicted. Inhabited by characters with names inspired by famous suicide cases such as the patriarch Mishima and his morose son Vincent, and exuding a macabre tone that recalls such disparate influences as Sweeney Todd and The Nightmare Before Christmas, this cheerful catalogue of misery is a compelling curiosity until its amusing bleakness is taken to unsettling extremes. It doesn’t help that the redundant lyrics of the film’s disruptive musical numbers, as when a psychiatrist notes life is like “a plate of diarrhea, served with a good Bordeaux” are cringeworthy to the point of vomit-inducing. You might feel like slitting your own wrists by the time Leconte’s would-be satire on human misery and instant gratification is over.

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