Review #274: Audition (1999)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #28 - Audition (1999)

Audition is a film about Shigeharu Aoyama, a widower who decides to find himself a new wife at the urging of his son. But being a hard-working executive-type, he doesn't have the time to go back out into the dating game- so he gets his friend, a film producer, to hold an audition for a fake movie, with the express purpose of instead finding Shigeharu the perfect woman to marry. He instantly falls for Asami, a mysterious and seemingly meek girl, and he becomes obsessed with making her his wife. But the more he tries to find out about her, the more things start to not add up, and the more danger Shigeharu gets himself into...

This is a hard movie to watch, it has to be said. I saw this for the first time about a year ago- it was one of those movies I had on my watch list for years but never got around to- and it was hard to watch the first time, doubly so this time around. It starts out as what could easily have been a typical rom-com, and then starts to get WEIRD. And DARK. And it culminates in some incredibly visceral violence and body horror. It's also the kind of film where you can see the tension rising as it goes, and you know something is right around the corner waiting to hurt you, but you keep going towards it anyway. That's an impressive quality in a film, but it makes it hard to get excited for a rewatch.

But even if it's difficult to rewatch, the quality of this movie is unmistakable. It put Takashi Miike on the map in America (he later went on to direct acclaimed films like Ichi the Killer and One Missed Call) and although I hadn't seen this movie until fairly recently, it was absolutely something I had heard of. (It may have been the first time I heard of "piano wire" in anything other than a musical sense, due to a very prominent scene at the end.) The cinematography is very distinct, the acting (as far as I can tell with a language barrier) seemed natural from everyone who was supposed to feel natural, and simply the fact that this movie can so seamlessly transition from what I myself described as a typical rom-com into bizarre torture porn requires incredible skill from everyone involved.

This movie also has some sort of a "je ne sais quoi" about its vibe that makes it very easy to get comfortable in, which might just have to do with the Japanese setting and the close home quarters that so many scenes take place in. If it weren't for the bizarre and creepy scenes scattered through the first half of the film and the fact that I knew how tense this movie was going to get near the end, I would really enjoy just putting on the first half of this movie to relax to!

Although I've docked some other movies for being difficult to rewatch, I really feel like this one's quality across the board make up for that enough to still rate it very high. I don't necessarily recommend watching this movie twice but I definitely recommend watching it once.

Overall Rating: 8/10 Extra Body Parts

No Thanks: There's a scene where Asami vomits into a dog bowl and then feeds it to a torture slave she has chained up. According to the director, the actress that plays Asami insisted on actually vomiting into the bowl on-set. It doesn't seem like the torture slave actor actually ate it, but seriously though, wtf?