Audition - Will's Review

This isn't the first time I've seen Audition, but I'm Damned if I remembered more than 10 minutes of it, so for all intents and purposes I went in cold on this one.

After his young adult son suggest it's time he remarries, widower Shigeharu enlists the help of a film producer friend to hold a fake Audition for a non existent roll, so that he may find a woman he wishes to date. He becomes immediately infatuated with one woman in particular (Asami) and pursues her.

Asami is receptive to Shingeharu's advances, but this being a horror movie, it's no spoiler to tell you that not everything goes smoothly, and that someone isn't what they appear.

I don't want to say too much, as the movie is a slow-build, and blowing exactly what it's building towards would hinder your enjoyment of this film, but I will say this; Audition is one of those movies that's really on,y about one scene, with everythin else being more-or-less a way to get there. That isn't to say that the rest of the movie is ballast, mind, far from it; the movie's build up is atmospheric and intriguing, but it would be nothing without the horrific scene towards which everything is building.

The nastiness, when it finally occurs, is fantastic (by which I mean brutal) but it gains it's power not from being graphic (it isn't) but by focussing on the glee of the perpetrator.

If you find that you generally don't get on with J-Horror, it's worth noting that Director Takashi Miike tends to be lighter with some of the tougher elements of the genre, telling stories with more straightforward timelines, and less room for interpretation than many of his contemporaries. That said, Audition does contain some of these elements, so if you really can't stand them, you should still give this one a wide birth (check out Miike's "Ichi the Killer" instead). For anyone with any affinity at all for J-Horror at all though, I strongly recommend this movie.