It’s the film that so disturbed one film critic that he suggested the Metropolitan Police should investigate its production. A legendary director also reportedly watched half of it before throwing the DVD out of his window because it was so “frightful”.
But to its fans, this is an astonishingly powerful psychological horror which has been credited with sparking an entire genre which became popular around the world in the 2000s.
The film is The Audition, a Japanese film about a lonely widower who, with the help of a film producer friend, holds an audition for a non-existent film so that he can select a potential new bride from the audition pool. The widower, Shigeharu (played by Ryo Ishibashi) becomes enamored with one particular young woman, which ends up being by far the worst mistake he ever made.
Although initially suspicious about Asami (played by Eihi Shiina) when he can’t find any references that back up her claims to have been a ballet dancer whose career was cut short by injury, Shigeharu continues to pursue her, even proposing marriage. It soon transpires that those references are, in fact, all dead.
Legendary film reviewer Mark Kermode described several years after the film’s release how “by the end of the screening I was hiding behind the seat in front of me cowering in terror”.
He revealed that when he lent it to British film director Ken Russell to watch “he watched half of the movie before throwing the disc out of the window and demanding to know what the hell I was doing bringing something so frightful into his home”. Kermode, however, named it as his film of the year and its prize-winning showing at the Rotterdam Film Festival also helped bring it to the wider attention of critics who, Kermode said, were “divided between those who viewed it as a misogynist nightmare and those who embraced it as a feminist revenge allegory with teeth”.
Film critic Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian in 2015, said the film was a “stomach-turning masterpiece” in which the female avenger was “bent on punishing typically Japanese male arrogance, but also self-pity and incipient masochism”.
Stephanie Archer, writing in Film Inquiry, said it is a “slow burner of a horror, an almost perfect example of a frog in boiling water”, while Carolyn Hands, writing for JoySauce.com, said it was “a film I’ve seen once and I’m not sure I’ll ever see again because it’s so effectively disturbing, which is exactly what you want with a horror film”.
And Chuck Bowen, writing for Slant magazine, said: “The film is a brutal examination of social isolation and malaise, and the gulf that often exists between men and women.”
The film is, in fact, based on a book and in a detailed analysis of both on Medium, Anna-Maria Ninnas says: “Audition has been critiqued as both misogynistic due to [Shigeharu’s] motivations, as well as feminist due to Asami’s inevitable revenge on the man who wronged her. In actuality, it’s neither: there’s a much deeper underlying commentary addressing Japanese women’s evolution from their ‘traditional’ selves.”
She adds: “The book, in fact, punishes men for the unreal standards set to Japanese women, romanticising an oppressive, patriarchal past. Meanwhile, the film is about the source of that ‘longing’ for the ‘traditional’ woman, which is the underlying belief that Japanese culture dies with the empowerment of women, thus the trend of demonising women in J-horror.”
One viewer said the film “might just hold the crown as the most disturbing film I’ve ever seen… as it takes you for a loop by presenting what looks to be this very by-the-numbers romantic dramedy only to pull the rug from underneath and deliver a deeply terrifying and sadistic tale of how someone is not who they seem to be”.
Even though the film is now well over 20 years old, it has lost none of its power. And the good news for you is that you can watch it any time on Amazon Prime (where it is included with premium subscription), YouTube and Google Play (from £1.99) or Apple TV (from £3.49).