The story goes that when Ôdishon (Audition) played at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000 it scored a record number of walkouts. You’d think that the sadistic cruelty that was so upsetting in 2000 would be old hat by now, but the film is so well and smartly made it has lost none of its ability to make your lower jaw drop down and your fingers to dig deeply into the sofa cushion. And it’s not that the film is gory—you can enjoy more blood and guts in a standard episode of “C.S.I.”
No, in the case of this film, horror, thy name is intensity.
Ryo Ishibashi stars as Shigeharu Aoyama, a man who has been living a lonely life with his son since the death of his wife seven years ago. (Purists, please forgive me but I am writing Japanese names as if they were European, with the surname last.) The son, Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) will soon be leaving home and suggests to his dad that he’s been single long enough. Shigeharu admits that he doesn’t even know how the dating game works anymore, but he is pleased by the fact that his son is aware of and cares about his lonliness.
Shigeharu visits with a friend, a man who works as a film producer. The producer comes up with a clever way for Shigeharu to meet young women: the two of them will pretend to be holding auditions for a new movie. They will interview dozens of potential date-mates, and Shigeharu can select the one he likes best and set up a time when they can meet. He frets about the shadiness of the idea’s morality, but ultimately agrees to try it.
Already, the film’s tone is odd. Not frightening yet—just odd. An air of melancholy hangs over what is essentially a romcom meet-cute situation.
Shigeharu is uncomfortable with every young woman he interviews until Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) shows up. She is slight, almost fragile looking. Pretty, quiet, respectful, she is everything an old school Japanese gentleman could wish for. At the conclusion of the interview, Shigeharu tells her that he will call soon to let her know his casting decision. When he does overcome his shame about his deceitfulness and phones her, she agrees to meet him. When they meet, he tells her the truth about the phony audition. She seems to like him for himself and he promises to call her again.
Later we see her sitting by the phone, waiting like a cat watching a mouse hole. A large filled and sealed canvas sack is visible on the floor by the phone. It could be Asami’s laundry, but we don’t think it is. It’s out of place, a surreal touch that sends a message about Asami. And it isn’t cheerful.
During a weekend tryst with Asami, Shigeharu begins to learn some disquieting things about her—she was a ballet student who had to quit dancing due to a hip injury; she was abused by her instructor.
After an afternoon of, we assume, sex, Shigeharu awakens to find that Asami has left. Back in town, the now completely smitten lover searches for the missing woman, and he discovers more and more of her past, which includes a murder by dismemberment. When the chopped-up body was investigated by the police, they uncovered three fingers and an ear too many. At Asami’s apartment we see that unsettling canvas sack moving and find out what it contains. Right. It isn’t dirty clothes.
Returning home, Shigeharu pours himself a drink then quickly falls to the floor paralyzed. Asami steps out of the shadows to inform that 1) the drug she gave him will prevent him from moving but not from being completely aware of what is happening to him and from feeling pain, and 2) the thin wire she shows him can cleanly cut through flesh and bone.
Working from a script by Daisuke Tengan, adapted from a novel by Ryû Murakami, director Takashi Miike has created one of the creepiest, most suspenseful horror films of the 1990s. Miike plays expertly with audience expectations, taking us right to the edge of what we expect to see only to suddenly shift the carpet under us so that we end up looking at things we never expected.
No list of great psycho thrillers will ever again be complete without Ôdishon close to the top. Don’t see it with someone you love—when it’s over, you won’t feel like you can trust her anymore.
