| Audition | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Takashi Miike |
| Produced by | Satoshi Fukushima |
| Written by | Ryu Murakami (Novel) Daisuke Tengan |
| Starring | Ryo Ishibashi Eihi Shiina |
| Music by | Kōji Endō |
| Cinematography | Hideo Yamamoto |
| Editing by | Yasushi Shimamura |
| Distributed by | Vitagraph Films (US) |
| Release date(s) | Canada: October 6, 1999 Japan: March 3, 2000 United Kingdom: October 17, 2001 United States: June 11, 2000 |
| Running time | 115 min. |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
Audition (オーディション Ōdishon) is a 1999 Japanese horror film directed by Takashi Miike and starring Ryo Ishibashi and Eihi Shiina. It is based on a Ryu Murakami novel of the same title. Over the years, the film has developed a cult following.[1]
Contents |
Shigeharu Aoyama (青山 重治Aoyama Shigeharu) (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower of seven years, is urged by his 17-year-old son, Shigehiko Aoyama (青山 重彦 Aoyama Shigehiko) (Tetsu Sawaki), to begin dating again. Aoyama is reluctant. His friend and colleague Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (吉川泰久 Yoshikawa Yasuhisa) (Jun Kunimura), a film producer, devises a mock casting audition in which young women would audition for the "part" of Aoyama's new wife. Aoyama tentatively agrees to the plan. He is immediately enchanted by Asami Yamazaki (山崎 麻美 Yamazaki Asami) (Eihi Shiina). In her audition, Asami says that she was a ballerina but had to give up dancing after an injury. Aoyama is attracted to her apparent emotional depth.
Yoshikawa says that he has a bad feeling about Asami. He can't reach any of the references on her résumé, and her job history is sketchy. The music producer she claimed to work for is missing. Aoyama is so enthralled by her that he pursues the romance anyway.
She lives in an empty apartment, containing a sack and a telephone. For four days after the audition, she sits perfectly still in the middle of the floor next to the telephone, waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, the sack lurches across the room and makes gurgling sounds. When Asami answers the phone, she pretends to Aoyama that she never expected him to call.
After several dates, she agrees to accompany him to a seaside hotel. Asami reveals that she was abused as a child and shows burn scars on her body. A deeply moved Aoyama pledges his love, and they have sex. In the morning, Aoyama is awakened by a telephone call. It is the front desk inquiring if he will be checking out since his companion has left. Asami is nowhere to be found.
Aoyama tries to track her down using her résumé, but as Yoshikawa warned all of the contacts are dead ends. At the dance studio where she claimed to have trained, he finds only a man with prosthetic feet who shares the name of Asami's childhood abuser. The bar where she claimed to work has been abandoned for a year following the murder and dismemberment of the owner. A passer-by tells Aoyama that the police found three extra fingers, an extra ear, and an extra tongue when they recovered the body.
Meanwhile, Asami goes to Aoyama's house. She finds a photo of his late wife. Enraged, she drugs his liquor decanter and hides. Aoyama comes home, pours a drink, and begins feeling the effects of the drug.
A flashback sequence shows that the sack in Asami's apartment contains a man missing both feet, his tongue, one ear and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out of the sack and begs for food. Asami vomits into a dog dish and places it on the floor for the man. The man sticks his face in the bowl of vomit, and hungrily consumes it.
Aoyama collapses from the drug. Asami injects Aoyama with a paralysis agent that leaves his nerves alert. She tortures him with needles. She tells him that, just like everyone else in her life, he has failed to love her only. She cannot tolerate his feelings for anyone else, even his own son. She claims she is teaching him the meaning of needing someone. She tells him that, "Words create lies, pain can be trusted." She giggles as she cuts off his left foot with a wire saw.
Shigehiko returns home as Asami begins to cut off Aoyama's other foot, and they struggle. Aoyama has a dream that he is waking up after he and Asami made love, and that his ordeal was only a nightmare. He awakes from the dream to see his son still struggling with Asami. Shigehiko kicks her down a flight of stairs, breaking her neck. Aoyama tells his son to call the police. Aoyama stares at the dying figure of Asami. She mutters incoherently about her excitement on seeing him again. He remembers that in the dream, he comforted her by saying, "It's hard to forget about, but someday you'll feel that life is wonderful."
Audition had its share of audience walk-outs. When shown at the 2000 Rotterdam Film Festival, one enraged female viewer confronted Miike by shouting at him, "You're evil!"[2]
For its unflinching graphic content, the film has been likened to the film adaptation of Stephen King's Misery and Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. However, the torture scene in the movie is very brief, and only a few shots show the actual torture, focusing more on Asami's sadistic enjoyment of it. Among filmmakers featured on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments (on which the film appeared at #11), notable horror directors including Eli Roth, John Landis and Rob Zombie found the film very difficult to watch,[3] given its grisly content; Landis said that the film was so disturbing that he couldn't enjoy it at all. Bloody Disgusting ranked the film fourteenth in their list of the 'Top 20 Horror Films of the Decade', with the article saying "Considered by many to be Takashi Miike’s masterpiece, this cringe-inducing, seriously disturbed film boasts one of the most unbearable scenes of torture in movie history... It’s revolting in the best possible way; the prolific Miike goes for the jugular here, and he cuts deep."[4]