Review of Audition (2000) by Shantel T — 06 Dec 2010

Company executive Aoyama Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi), a seven-year widower, is urged by his son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) to remarry. Shigeharu's colleague (Jun Kunimura) concocts a plan to set up auditions for a part in a film, letting Shigeharu leaf through the résumés in advance and sit in on the auditions to find a woman to his liking. He is drawn to a twenty-four-year-old woman named Asami (Eihi Shiina). He calls her the same evening of the audition to ask her out to dinner and becomes completely enamored with the mysterious woman. As you might imagine, she neglects to mention in her résumé that her favorite pastime is removing people's extremities with a wire saw.

This film sounded delightfully perverse when it came to my attention, but, despite its cult status, I, as is so frequently the case, was left scratching my head. Sure, I can understand the twisted bastards out there who get off on torture porn, but this film doesn't even deliver until its final half hour and, despite reports of people collapsing in shock during a showing at the Irish Film Institute in 2001, I couldn't see what all the fuss is about. It's nothing that hasn't been greatly surpassed by the Saw films, which have become a bit of a grisly annual tradition back in the States. If you want to see an Asian horror film that will really make you sick, I would recommend skipping Audition and getting a copy of Thailand's Art of the Devil 2 (2005).

The first hour of Audition could easily be mistaken for a romance film. This film takes forever to cut to the chase and, by the time it finally gets there, you're left wondering how they're going to wrap it up in time. Much as expected, the ending proves abrupt and uninteresting and a hefty portion of the film is consumed by nonsensical visual sequences that only serve to confound the viewer for no apparent reason. What was the point of this film? If it was to entertain, it failed miserably.