Audition (1999)

Directors who churn out a movie a year are considered prodigiously prolific. Henceforth, Japanese director Takashi Miike, averaging a production of six movies a year, ranks entirely off the normal scale. However, far from being hampered by that punishing production rate, or by the low budgets imposed on him, Miike flourishes on seemingly inexhaustible reserves of energy and inventiveness, consistently creating provocative, visceral movies that fall somewhere between arthouse and exploitation cinema. Driven by a unique, often perverse vision, Miike's movies are full of surprises and shocks, exploring humanity at its criminal, sexual or scatological extreme. Simply put, he’s one of today's greatest living directors and his best movies are, once seen, totally unforgettable.

Audition is not like many other films Miike is known for. There are no dizzying fits of excessive violence and there is no visual outrage by any stretch. Based on a novel by Ryu Murakami, this was the first of his movies to have gone out on general release attracting mainstream attention and in Audition, Miike demonstrates his talents with his thorough mastery of the horror genre's tropes and the ability to create something strikingly new from them. Apart from having a carefully modulated building of tension and heart-poundingly strong conclusion, it’s also a moving study of the deep psychological scars which past tragedies can leave.

It's one of those movies that is difficult to discuss without giving the whole game away, because there's one hell of a twist in Audition. At first, the film appears to be a melancholy love story about Aoyama Shigeharu's search for a woman to take the place of his dead wife. He’s a movie producer and someone suggests that he finds himself a suitable woman from a casting audition. Although the shy and basically decent Shigeharu has second thoughts about the scheme, he soon finds himself drawn to one of the applicants: Asami (Eihi Shiina), a softly spoken girl whose modesty strikes a chord with him. She is also damaged by past loss, and Shigeharu is infatuated, despite warnings that something might not be right about her. After a brief period of courtship, Asami and Shigeharu sleep together at a hotel, where a nightmare begins in which Shigeharu is torn apart by feelings of paralysis at the loss of his wife, by his own guilty conscience, by anxiety for his teenage son, and by the sweet torture coming from his desire for Asami, all of which culminating in a surreal, sadomasochistic climax.

Miike’s masterplan is deceptively straightforward: to dress up a paranoid modern fairytale romance in a mid-life crisis clothing. Fears of loneliness, trust and misplaced desire are central and Miike toys with all of this, stampeding them into the ground when they reach full bloom. Any hope that is presented in Audition has a rancid taste. Asami seems a fantasy creation, her demure and charming manners giving her an almost ghastly atmosphere. Like a modern day Siren, Asami tempts the unwary by singing a beautiful song, satiating each prey’s desire until it’s lost in mid-sea. Left stranded, these unfortunate victims are toyed with and then slain while adrift and helpless, still blinded by the love of their own fantasy. In their dying moments, the realization comes that they've been chasing the unobtainable all along, a mere phantom of their own creation luring them to their own demise.

The movie is never actually about Asami herself, although the viewer witnesses the catalogue of abuse, but the perspective of which is consistently Shigeharu's, lingering on his perceived sense of satisfaction and desire. Asami remains distant throughout the movie and this is why the it seems to go from a very long introduction to a sudden climax in one leap -- there simply is no middle part to tell. The movie initially builds a recurring sense of skin-crawling foreboding atop its ostensible innocuousness, especially as Shigeharu discovers the girl's proximity to past disappearances and grisly murders yet somehow failing to match one with the other. But after a few acts of linear storytelling in which these characters become lovers, the narrative suddenly careens into a non-linear, non-literal nightmare, eventually coalescing into a metaphorical montage. This can be jarring for the superficial viewer because the movie shifts gears without prior warning or transition of any kind.

Acting performances of Ryo Ishibashi and especially Eihi Shiina are the movie's other great asset. The young model-turned-actress manages to play, with absolute conviction, many overlapping but wildly divergent characteristics. The way she sweetly, innocently sings while performing the movie's most disturbing torture sequence is a remarkable demonstration of emotional dexterity.

Miike's enigmatic allegory of a self-tormenting soul leaves its bloody imprint on the viewer's consciousness both because of the attention he pays to building sympathy for the damaged vulnerability of his two central characters, and because the movie's final sequences portray Shigeharu's torment with graphic viciousness. While this might force viewers to reassess the limits of their own squeamishness, Audition is ultimately a tragic movie about the pain of loneliness, loss and longing -- ending, in a typical Miike gesture, in an absurdly upbeat song played through the closing credit roll.

Audition is a slow-burning psychological thriller that builds ominously and inexorably to its shocking pay-off and then leaves you squirming in your seat, but with enough subtlety and depth that for days afterwards you will be trying to pick up the pieces. It’s a meditative, melancholic masterpiece that is not for the squeamish.