I just saw it at a midnight screening, and the anticipation I and my friends felt was very high. Even the theatre management offered us their high praise of what they said is a very intense and unforgettable film.

Unforgettable and intense would be just two words I would use to describe AUDITION. The words suspenseful, horrific, sad, creepy, and graphic also come to mind. This is not a film for younger viewers (those under 17) or those who are squeamish at all.

The story revolves around a man, Aoyama(Ryo Ishibashi) who some years earlier lost his wife to illness, and had to raise their young son on his own. In the present day, his son is about 22 years old, and Aoyama is feeling old and very lonely. His business partner and he hatch a plan to find him a bride. They use the guise of casting for a film. They hold a casting call from the hundreds of interested young girls who respond to their solicitation. Ayoama, who desperately wants to find a wife, has already set his sights on one girl, Asami (Eihi Shiina) whose very touching letter he read from her resume.

Asami enters the interview room dressed in virginal/angelic white, acting very humble and deferential like a traditional Japanese woman would act toward a man. She is literally a vision of beauty and peace, while there is much more to her emotionally and psychologically. The business partner tells the man there is something he feels is amiss with Asami, and recommends against choosing her. However, Aoyama is irresistibly attracted to her, and can think of nothing but phoning her to say she has the "part" for their fake movie.

What transpires for the first half of the film is an unfolding of a potential relationship, wherein Aoyama and Asami spend hours in cafes revealing the most intimate emotions and details of their painful lives. Aoyama truly believes he is falling in love, and all will be well. He does come to tell Asami that he isn't really casting for a film, but really looking for a wife and lifelong companion. Asami then suggests they go away for a weekend away, and the downward spiral begins...

What follows for the next 45 minutes or so is a collage of dream-like flashbacks (a la David Lynch), extreme violence, and a lot of "heartbreak." I'm not going to detail the events of the last 20 minutes as this is the point where you DEFINITELY don't want to get up and walk away from the screen. Too much happens here and if you blink, you will miss something.

If you look past the graphic depiction of torture/revenge visited upon the men in this film, you will see that AUDITION is in many ways a social commentary on the modern-day perils, both real and imagined, that all people potentially encounter when they are paralyzed by their fears of loneliness, rejection and sadness.

The film's key strength is its use of genuine suspense and the deliberate unfolding of one horrific image followed by something more innocent. It is this juxtaposition of horror and innocence, love and hate, revenge and desire, that draws the viewer further into the darkness that is the soul of the abused and the unloved.

Recommended with a caution that is very graphic and disturbing. Nonetheless, you won't likely soon forget it!


Exceptionally Disturbing Thriller Film   September 25, 2003
 13 out of 15 found this review helpful

Disturbing is too kind of a word for this film, yet in its way Audition works as a shock-thriller meant to sear itself into your brain.

Suppose your wife dies, and you're getting old and lonely. Do you hit the bar scene to find an annoying, giggly, snobby girlfriend (watch the film...)? No! You get your movie producer friend to set up a fake movie so you can screen the young women auditioning for the lead role as prospective wives. Perhaps what later ensues is simply turnabout for fair play...

Everyone has a "bad feeling" about Aoyama's choice, and for good reason. Demure little Asami spends her free time at home, sitting hunched-over and drooling while waiting for the phone to ring... with a large, bulging sack in the background.

The film does explore very well the fears of men in Japan today while at the same time looking hard at and twisting the role of the "obedient" and proper traditional Japanese woman that Aoyama so desired. Looked at from a cross-cultural perspective, the film makes much more sense--which only heightens the horror and disturbing nature of its message.

I would wonder (or perhaps worry) about those who claim to truly love this film, but at the same time those who enjoy psycho thrillers or like to be disturbed will find this movie worth a watch. It's not what I'd call true horror, but you will definitely be horrified!


Doesn't live up to the hype.   March 8, 2003
 12 out of 32 found this review helpful

I love horror movies, especially intelligent, subtle ones. I kept hearing about this movie from people who compared it to Ringu. After seeing it, I'm not sure how it earned that comparison.

I love the main concept of Audition, the story is a critique of sex roles in Japan. The film is very well made, from a technical standpoint. The sets and lighting start out very ordinary, and slowly get more extreme. Same goes with the camera work. So all the pieces of a really great movie are there.

But the ending is horrible. I have no problem with the violence, and there's a surprisingly small amount of gore considering the situation. But the film takes what should have been creepy and understated and shoves it in your face. It's as if the filmmaker was afraid that we're all too stupid to get his point. And although the movie's theme was made totally clear, the plot got sloppy. The story just dissolves into a mess of relatively dull hallucinations and flashbacks, occasionally punctuated by severe torture. I think that throwing together a bunch of dreamy scenes is a cop out ending. I guess some people see that kind of thing and call it art, but I'm not one of them.

So please, rent this before you buy it.


Homebrewer   February 16, 2005
 10 out of 10 found this review helpful

I will not go over plot points already covered in other reviews, but rather add another dimension to the discussion of the horror / gore aspect of the movie.

In my view, the horrific and gory scenes of Aoyama being drugged, dismembered and so on are all dreamt. That is, everything between Aoyama being covered with a sheet after entering the bed with Asami and his waking up to fetch a glass of water is a dream. The dream continues after he goes back to bed.

To put it simply, at the surface level, the movie is a psychologically acute and well acted drama about the growing relationship between Asami and Aoyama. Now, just as vintage horror fans will tell you, that which is implied is far more subtly terrifying than simple splatter and gore. The torture and punishment Aoyama undergoes at the hands of Asami is a nightmare firmly rooted in the narrative of the so-called boring build-up to these gut-wrenching scenes.

An attentive look at the first three quarters of the movie reveals how motifs, phrases, and the emotional 'baggage' brought by each protagonist to the relationship are reworked in Aoyama's subconscious into a terrifying nightmare.

It is to the writer's credit that this nightmare follows dream-logic in a way that is still cinematic and accessible. It is a dream which reveals much about the character of Aoyama, and nothing at all about Asami. (In fact, through the whole film, she is more an object of his gaze and interpretation than a subject narrating her own experience.)

Does this mean that this movie should not be classified as a horror film? In my view, it is better seen, and only makes sense, at the level of an insightful, character driven drama about the guilt-complex of a traditional middle-aged man decided upon marrying a younger woman with some baggage of her own. Her 'baggage' is, of course, only alluded to, but it is enough for Aoyama's imagination to work into a powerful expression of his own fears and sense of guilt. And, likeable as the character of Aoyama is, there is enough for his guilt to chew on: he has used the artificial and deceptive 'audition' to find himself a wife. He was against the idea but talked into it by his coworker. Is it so strange that his subconscious should reproach him for it? He is remarrying after the death of his first wife through illness. Is it so strange that she should reappear in the dream sequence to warn him against Asami? And Asami herself is somewhat of a mysterious character. She is marrying a far older man. Why? And why isn't she already involved with someone. She has had a difficult upbringing. What emotional scars might it have left on her? The character herself, so brilliantly acted, also conveys a negative 'vibe' in the way some people just seem to do.

This is a movie in which the 'male' gaze is very much the primary one. The story is told from his point of view. But the female has her own revenge. She intrudes through the workings of his subconscious, complicated by his doubts and his repressed sense of guilt. If she must be objectified in the manner she is, an unattached female drawn out of a short-list of viable female candidates and turned into a dutiful wife, then she might just become, potentially a rather nasty object. In the strange, reverse world of the dream, she has become the active subject, and he is the drugged and immobile victim of her tortures and punishments. .

Why, then, is the movie always referred to as a horror film? In short, it needed to be promoted as such to get an audience. If the reviews here are anything to go by, it certainly seems to have been received as such.

But it is so much more than a horror flick, one-and-a-half hours more in fact. It is NOT a horror film with good characterization, but an insightful romantic drama with a violent undertone of personal and cultural repression. In fact, I would say that it is unique in standing between the two genres, linking the two and transgressing the bounds of both, for if horror films are so often characterless splatterfests, then romantic dramas are also often guilty of being superficial, sugary twaddle. To see it any other way is to overlook what the film achieves at once so brilliantly and so terrifyingly. Whether this was a fluke or intended as such, can only be answered by the director himself. I like to think, that like Asami, this movie can take on a life of its own in the viewer's mind. A+++ of an movie!


"I don't like her...her chemistry...it's not right."   June 24, 2005
 10 out of 11 found this review helpful

SWEET JEBUS.

Before watching this, my first Takeshi Miike movie, I thought that The Exorcist, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, Rosemary's Baby, and Kubrick's The Shining were the scariest horror films I'd ever seen.

Audition blows them ALL away in a single stroke. I seriously don't know exactly what level of damage we inflicted to the Japanese psyche with our "visit" to Hiroshima 50 years back, but methinks it has something to do with the likes of this movie; which (along with the rest of Miike's oeuvre) makes 99% of American horror entries past and present look like an episode of The Brady Bunch by comparison.

The genius of this film lies in its pacing. Unlike most pedestrian, substandard "slasher" flicks which hit you with the splatter and severed bodies almost right up front, Audition takes its sweet time in milking the suspense for all it's worth. At first, this movie seems like a slightly quirky romantic comedy with a Japanese twist (main character and film producer Aoyama's wife dies of terminal illness, so at the behest of one of his friends he stages a fake film audition in order to find a prospective bride). He discovers the delightful, alluring, and stereotypically submissive beauty Asami (played to the cold steel hilt by Eihi Shiina), a woman who is not at all who she appears..

I won't spoil the rest. Suffice to say, once things start coming unglued and Asami reveals her true sadistic nature, you will be left with images that dive like a red-hot fireplace poker straight into your psyche; a portrayal of cultural gender roles turned on their heads; and will probably have to sleep with the lights on for the next week and a half. You will never look at a doctor's needle or even the mere act of calling your pet cat the same way again. And I mean all that in the best possible way. Bravo to Miike for such a bold, unsettling film. Five stars, easy.