Review of Audition (2000) by Kimberly S — 24 Aug 2009

An aging widower, Shigeharu, who loses his wife to a chronic disease finds more than he bargained for in young aspiring actress Asami, who turns out to be one of the most deeply psychotic women serial killers ever portrayed on film.

It's a sad scene when Shigeharu loses his wife. He has a young son who now will be forced to grow up without a mother.

Friends at work start pressuring Shigeharu to remarry, or at least to get a life outside of his quiet monk-like existence with his son. But Shigeharu does not spring into action until his son says, "Dad, you need to find someone.".

So his co-workers at the Studio where he works set up a fake audition for a TV Series. Really, it's an audition for Shigeharu's future wife.

The actresses are unimpressive, some even resorting to nude performance art to get the producer's attention. However, Asami comes in fully clothed. She is reedy and delicate, and seems to be the first actress with a real brain. Shigeharu is intrigued and asks her on a date.

The romance develops, and all of you are asking:

"Where's the horror?".

Don't worry. It's coming.

Asami reveals that she was a tortured and abused child. Once upon a time, she wanted to be a ballet dancer but suffered an injury to the hips that squelched her ballet career. Her crippled adoptive uncle sexually abused her, made her sit in cold water until she got pneumonia as a child. Even the hip injury seems to be suspicious.

SPOILERS.

Asami plays sweet and innocent (the real actress, Eihi Shiina, is a model) but she's got a secret. There's a man tied up in her apartment who is missing his fingers, his ear, and his tongue. He's her ex-producer. Asami's favorite pasttime is revealed: she kidnaps, tortures, and kills her producers in horrific ways.

After they sleep together, Shigeharu decides Asami is the woman for him. However, she disappears off the face of the planet after their romantic evening.

Despite ghostly warnings from his dead wife, Shigeharu plays amateur detective and tries to track down Asami.

To make a long story short, he goes to the scene of where the ex-producer was abducted and finds out that Asami is the world's angriest female psycho. He tracks down the uncle too, and the uncle creepily declares that Asami is his greatest "work of art".

The end scene is really gross and I won't tell you who dies. The moral of Audition, if there is one, is that even the fiercest anger can me misplaced. A sub-moral of the story is that if your gut instincts tell you that a person who enters your life is untrustworthy or even dangerous, your gut is probably right.