Simultaneously a sequel and a prequel to his notorious 2002 film “Suicide Club” (also distributed as “Suicide Circle”) Sion Sono’s 2005 film “Noriko’s Dinner Table” continues the 46-year-old writer and director’s filmic fascination with the turbulent inner lives and resulting desperate acts of high school-age Japanese girls.

In “Noriko’s Dinner Table,” which begins a one-week run at the Pioneer Theater today, seventeen-year-old Noriko (Kazue Fukiishi) longs to escape a life of muted teenage angst in the provincial Japanese city of Toyokawa. Her father, Tetsuzo (Ken Mitsuishi), is an emotionally unavailable scold, her mother is a passive human dish rag, and her kid sister Yuka (Yuriko Yoshitaka) appears to be immune to the family’s toxic dynamic.

Noriko’s only solace is an Internet chat room where other disenchanted kids (shown as kilted, high-fiving silhouettes) can get the peer group validation and companionship that is apparently extinct in Japanese real time. “I was happy and surprised that I found my best friends like this,” Noriko says. “They were girls in Tokyo. I had to go to Tokyo.”

But when Noriko arrives in the big city and makes contact with her virtual friend, Ueno54, she discovers that the girl behind the Web handle, Kumiko (Tsugumi), is part of an underground group somewhere between a prostitution ring and a guerrilla theater troupe. Kumiko and her ersatz siblings and parents rent themselves out as a surrogate family. Soon Noriko joins them as they stand in for dead loved ones and enjoy all the fellowship and endure all the abuse that comes with family life — but in controlled doses.

The two girls also endure the act of mass self-destruction that was at the center of “Suicide Club,” in which 54 teenaged girls join hands and jump in front of a subway train. The previous film’s memorable sequence is duplicated shot-for-shot, except that this time the outrageous sluice of blood that gushes up onto the subway platform splashes Noriko and Kumiko in their faces.

Fearing that her older sister has perished in the subway leap, Yuka runs away to Tokyo, prompting her mother to alter the family irrevocably. Tetsuzo has nothing left to do but grieve and search the big city for his two missing daughters. As he gets closer, he runs afoul of the family rental cult. “Anyway, imagine that the Sun Goddess was born in a locker,” a “family” member excitedly explains in a line that would not be out of place spoken backwards by a dwarf in a David Lynch dream sequence. Eventually the answers that “Noriko’s Dinner Table” offers to its own ubiquitous question (another holdover from the previous film) — “Are you connected to yourself?” — are all just as impenetrable.

Mr. Sono, a published poet and novelist, crams his film with first-person narration. “I walked down the hall,” Noriko says, and sure enough that’s just what we see her do. Her subtitled interior monologue (as well as those delivered by her father and her sister) is so ubiquitous and dreadfully redundant that “Noriko’s Dinner Table” might better have been presented as a book on tape.

For all its excesses, “Suicide Club” clocked in at a relatively brisk 99 minutes. The most shocking thing about “Noriko’s Dinner Table” is that it goes over and over the same ground for 159 long minutes. “I wanted to live, challenge, wish, forget, learn, know, ask, see, stare, understand, hear, listen, speak, meet, and be there,” Noriko declares over three full screens of subtitles while she struggles with her luggage in the background. By the film’s halfway point I just wanted her to shut up and let a picture, any picture, even one of teens killing themselves, tell the story.

An independently financed film from a vanguard counter culture autodidact, “Noriko’s Dinner Table” makes no aesthetic reference to anything other than Mr. Sono’s other work. Its unrelenting, claustrophobic, handheld photography is the antithesis of Yasujiiro Ozu and Kon Ichikawa’s trenchant and evocative visual storytelling. And the film’s rehashing of story events from different voices with identical perspectives is the opposite of the ingenious and fabled narrative invention Akira Kurosawa demonstrated during his 88-minute “Rashomon.”

Once, years ago, when walking past a vegan restaurant with a glass storefront, my companion paused, gestured at the sallow, frowning faces inside and said, “Don’t you think these people would be happier with just the littlest bit of butter?” The question that “Noriko’s Dinner Table” begs is: “Wouldn’t this be an infinitely more tolerable film experience if it had just the littlest bit of traditional Japanese film classicism?”

Through June 19 (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-591-0434).