Audition (1999)
a.k.a. Ôdishon
This is the first time I’ve felt morally obligated to warn you that a movie is so deeply disturbing, even reading the spoiler for it could give you nightmares.
If no one had already coined the phrase “extreme cinema,” it would have been invented for Audition.
I’m not kidding. You could sit through a quintuple-feature of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Suspiria, The Exorcist, The Hills Have Eyes, and Seven, and emerge less damaged than you may be after a single viewing of Audition.
Or, as KFC Cinema puts it: “‘Audition’ is as much fun as the Incredible Hulk stripping you down, bending you over and sodomizing you with all his Lou Ferrigno might. It is definitely an erection killer and you will not recover from Takashi Miike’s film.”
That said, if you really want to know what it’s about and how it ends, here goes…
At the suggestion of his young son, all-around-nice-guy widower Aoyama (Ryô Ishibashi) starts thinking about finding a new wife. Since Aoyama is a movie producer, his friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) comes up with the idea of holding a casting call for a nonexistent film, as an excuse to “audition” potential wives. The last woman to audition is Asami (the very hot Eihi Shiina). Aoyama is smitten.
Yoshikawa has a bad feeling about Asami, especially after all the references on her resumé turn out to be fake. He warns Aoyama not to contact her, but — after much hesitation (during which Asami just sits and stares at the phone, waiting) — Aoyama calls her.
Aoyama and Asami spend a weekend together, but when Asami learns the audition was a fake, she vanishes — and Audition suddenly switches gears (from what could easily have been a Japanese version of a Julia Roberts-Richard Gere “meet cute” romantic comedy), descending into utter depravity. (As one who loves flesh-eating zombies, gory driver’s-ed films, and early John Waters, I do not use the word “depravity” lightly.)
Aoyama goes nuts trying to find her, and in the process, discovers she’s not quite what she seems to be. What we figure out along the way, through a dizzying series of flashbacks and (possibly) dream sequences, is that Asami was horribly abused by her stepfather, and has a vendetta against all men.
All this leads up to a Grand Guignol climax (for lack of a better word), with Aoyama bound to a bed while Asami spends the last 15 minutes of the film torturing him with acupuncture needles in his eyes, piano wire to slice off his foot… And you don’t want to know what she makes the guy in the bag eat (but it’s worse than Divine’s last meal in Pink Flamingos).
(Oh, the guy in the bag? He’s just one of Asami’s many victims, missing a leg, a few fingers, his tongue…)
Later, Aoyama wakes up on a floor, grabs for his missing foot, and realizes it wasn’t all just a terrible nightmare.
Oh yeah, and there’s another piano-wire scene earlier in the picture — Asami decapitates a music teacher.
And you men out there thought Alex was enough to turn you off dating? (Although — unnervingly — some viewers find Audition erotic! I fear these these same viewers might also find Nazi death-camp footage erotic. This isn’t a garden-variety BDSM movie — this is criminal sadism to the nth degree.)
Now, if you actually watch this stomach-turning nightmare, don’t say you weren’t warned.
— Special thanks to Jaime for all the input!
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