Audition is a film best summed up with the timeless words of Haddaway.

What is love?


Baby don't hurt me.

This film is by Japan's finest Takashi Miike, who also brought us Ichi the Killer, among many others, and is a psychological horror about a TV executive who's looking for a new wife. While doing some auditions for a film, he becomes entangled with a peculiar young lady. This is a decision he will later regret. Definitely.

The film begins with the death of his wife, and then jumps forward seven years, where we find him depressed and lonely, with only his son for company. Not that kind of company.

He sets out on a quest to remarry, and his friend at the TV station decides to help him, so invites him to some auditions to see the girls. I didn't enjoy how unsubtle the film was in making him seem very lonely, by having every single person he talks to mention women or love in some capacity, and then getting a shot of his poor little sad face.

When he's reading the info sheets on the girls, he spills coffee on one of them and decides that it's a sign. The only sign it could have possibly been was that his coffee was trying to destroy the sheet and keep him safe.

At the audition, he takes an interest in this girl. I didn't like how he takes an interest in her when everyone else finds her weird. And she is weird. They could have at least found someone who didn't like look a lunatic.

The film is very slow paced for the first half, and add to this that there isn't much music throughout the entire film, and it can be quite hard going for the first 50 minutes or so. Though the first part of the film is very light hearted and quite funny, so I wouldn't say that it's boring. It just doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. It kind of filters in the creepy stuff slowly at first, so there are scenes that just leave you thinking "The fuck was that about?" until you finish the film, when you will ask yourself that question on a bigger scale.

The film is very artistic, and makes use of exaggerated sounds, weird camera angles (a lot of tilted shots which can be quite unnerving) and in some parts, quite obvious colour tinting.

At one point our hero goes to this weird boarded up house and finds a creepy old man in a wheelchair. I don't know how he finds this place, or more to the point, how the old man in a wheelchair is still alive when it's boarded up and derelict. Unless there's a back door?

The film really starts to move after the sex scene. I guess he's been drugged and tripping his balls off, but it's hard to tell because this film makes so much use of flashbacks and hallucinations and dreams and premonitions, and even stuff that just doesn't make sense in the story but adds meaning. I like the disorientation all of this stuff causes though. It forces you to empathise with the character, and not just in the boring usual way of showing what they're going through and using mood music. This film goes "He doesn't know what the fuck is going on. Neither will you."

It turns out that the girl he's fallen for is a bit crazy and was abused as a child, and is extremely jealous. She makes him promise to love no one else but her, and then catches him out when he loves his son. Not in that way. This results in one of the best torture scenes in film for my money. It's like the Japanese version of Misery, but obviously being Japanese, it's a lot more messed up. Like instead of breaking his ankles, she slices them off with wire. There's also some element of masochism, as she seems to love doing all this stuff to the person she loves.

It's implied that she's done this before (fallen for a man, decided he was untrustworthy, tortured him) through the messed up man in a sack, though I found it quite contradictory that she was saying he can love no-one else and she's got her ex bagged up at home. Credit where credit's due though; At least she wasn't just moaning that all men are bastards.

Overall, I love this film. It's so messed up, looks amazing, and is very technically complex. It's hard going to watch, but well worth it if you want a change from conventional film.