Rating:
I’m no fan of Japanese horror movies, but if there’s one Japanese director working today who could make one I do like, it’s Takashi Miike. He hasn’t made one I like, but he probably could.

Film criticism is of course always a subjective exercise but, despite my informal and personal style, I usually try to write a review based not just on my personal feelings while watching a picture but on my knowledge of cinema technique and history as well. It’s hard for me to do that with Audition, because I think it’s probably not that bad but I very much didn’t like it. At the same time, I almost liked it, and can see how I could have.

The story is that of Mr. Aoyama, a widower (Ryo Ishibashi) who, when told by his son that he looks old and lonely, decides it’s time to remarry. But he is old—older, at least, than his first time around—and doesn’t know if he has what it takes to jump back into dating, a young man’s game. He wants to find his ideal woman, but on the other hand he doesn’t particularly want to work at it. What’s interesting here is that it’s never quite clear whether he actually worries that he no longer knows how to go about finding a wife or if he’s just not actually that interested in the process, only doing it because his son suggested it and it seems like the right thing to do.

When a friend suggests the idea of holding a phony audition for a nonexistent movie as a pretext for screening many wifely candidates Aoyama agrees—half-jokingly but, as always when something is half a joke, half not.

Scores of young women arrange for an audition, but through all the process only one catches Aoyama’s eye: A quiet yet charming girl named Asami (Eihi Shiina). Aoyama’s friend advises him that something about the girl doesn’t feel right, and besides they should really hold at least one round of callbacks; this is an audition for an important part, after all. Aoyama ignores his friend. Since first seeing her résumé, he’s had eyes only for Asami.

He calls her, meets her for dinner, is more enchanted by her all the time. Eventually he invites her to go away with him for a weekend, during the course of which he intends to propose. After Asami makes him promise that he’ll love only her, the two make love. By morning, she’s disappeared.

If it seems I’ve described a lot of movie without mentioning anything horrifying, it’s true. If you didn’t know going in that Audition was billed as a horror movie, it would be a long time before you’d ever guess. For most of its running time, the movie has no dealings at all with the trappings of the fright film. It’s deliberately slow-paced, showing Aoyama’s life as no different in its mundane details from anybody else’s and keeping firmly, almost defiantly, grounded in realism. This story of a man with an unorthodox plan to find a wife is the stuff of either romantic comedy or melodrama. As the movie goes on, the viewer decides it must be the latter and begins to bring his own notions to the proceedings; a lifetime of seeing movies means we know what to expect in this kind of movie.

And that’s why I almost liked this movie. Audition is essentially a long, slow buildup to the last 25 minutes or so, when the audience’s trust is violated and its expectations are thrown aside as the film does a quick about-face and becomes something else entirely. This could make for a wonderful horror movie experience. Audiences have seen a lot of movies; we’re pretty savvy and we have a good handle on the way things are done in different kinds of movies. I don’t know if it’s possible for a modern audience to be completely fooled like this—we remember what happened with Janet Leigh and so are wary of giving our trust 100% to any movie—but in Audition it’s done about as well as it can be. By gaining your trust before violating it so completely, the movie works for its scares, something so many horror movies are unwilling to do.

It’s what happens after this turnaround that made me not like the movie. Asami is revealed to be not so sweet and demure as she’s seemed but a violent maniac. So far, so good. But the events that follow, as she feeds a previously mutilated victim a bowl of barf (though it’s not 100% clear whether that part actually happened in the film’s reality or was merely a dream, you have to watch it either way) and tortures Aoyama with needles and piano wire, are so thoroughly unpleasant, so much more a test of endurance than anything else, that I couldn’t enjoy it.

It’s not that I had to look away and hide my eyes against somebody’s shoulder, like a girl in a cliched movie about kids on a date in the 1950s. It’s just that I wished I wasn’t watching it at all, and that a movie that had worked so hard at pulling me in for the last hour and a half would then try to scare me rather than just try to turn my stomach. And it is stomach turning. Those with weak constitutions and an even moderate aversion to gore should avoid the movie entirely. There’s none of the fun sort of splatter you can laugh and hoot at, as in a well-done zombie picture. There is only unrelieved awfulness.

This movie really drove home to me the idea that I think I’ve outgrown the horror gorefest. By outgrown I don’t mean to say it takes a childish mentality to enjoy that kind of movie. I know that isn’t true. But I think that I’ve come to a place in movie watching habits and that I’ve seen that kind of blood-spraying movie so many times that it no longer interests me. That combined with just how far Audition goes in its efforts to make you feel bad made it impossible for me to enjoy.

A certain kind of audience loves this movie just because it has such icky scenes. I’m sure there are others who are delighted by the way Audition plays with our expectations and turns what we think we know about movies upside down, and who also found that the nastiness of the film’s last half hour was just right for them. But I suspect there are a lot of viewers like me, who wish the end of the picture had been something else, something worthy of all the work done getting there.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Made of Honor
• Leave Jersey Girl Alone!
• The Evil Dead
• Pelts