October Horror (31 Days Of Horror Movie Reviews) Day Fifteen: Audition (1999) All right, Friends and Fiends, prepare to feel a little bit queasy. Or, hell, maybe a LOT queasy. Because today we’re going to talk about madman director Takashi Miike’s horror masterpiece, Audition. So buckle up and get ready, because this is not a movie to rush into unprepared. Let’s think about the simplicity of the story first: A widowed man is urged by his son to begin dating again, with the hope of finding a new wife to avoid the loneliness he feels. At the suggestion of a shady business partner, he decides to hold auditions for the female lead in a movie that doesn’t exist in order to meet women. Through this kind of sleazy set-up, he meets Asami, who he believes just might be perfect. She’s beautiful and smart, and although he soon finds himself smitten with her, he begins to feel guilty about misleading her with the fake audition. Asami, meanwhile, is a woman with secrets, and she’s very good at keeping them. And the things that the widower finds when he starts trying to uncover these secrets are truly disturbing. I’m going to stop there, because to say anything more would be to take away the incredible power this movie has to unnerve viewers and get under their skin. There are things that are merely suggested, and others that are openly shown, and still others that may or may not be real…until everything adds up in the end. One prolonged sequence in particular towards the end is almost excruciating to sit through (anybody who has seen this one knows EXACTLY what I’m talking about) and yet is so exquisitely set up and shot by Miike, at the top of his game here, that you can’t look away. Audition is one of the finest examples of Asian horror cinema out there today, and a masterpiece of audience manipulation and deception in the art of storytelling. youtube/watch?v=UPgA88v0aDU
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 15:35:58 +0000