Riding the new wave of Japanese horror started the previous year by Hideo Nakata's Ring, Takashi Miike's Audition shows a different twist on the horror genre by masking it in a melodrama.
Shigeharu Aoyama is a middle age workaholic and the owner of a production company. His teenage son suggests he remarries after his wife had passed away 7 years earlier. A friend and colleague suggests that they set up an audition for a fake feature and he can use it as a kind of speed date.
In the interviews he meets Asami who he is instantly drawn to. Despite his friend's serious apprehensions to her and the fact that her back story and resume have huge holes in them, they start to date and she seems to be the ideal partner. He plans to propose on a weekend away however she disappears in the middle of the night. Shigeharu has no idea where she lives, she wont answer her phone and he only has her flimsy background on which to track her down, but track her down he must.
The sudden change of tone in the last reel is quite horrific as Asami's true self appears.
The problem with this is that there is such a change in shift, the rest of the film seems a bit negated. What could have been a study on loneliness and moving on after grief is just a bit of a trite gore fest. Asami is, quite simply a fucked up chick and completely crackers. Her character has no arc though and her psychosis is only roughly explained as down to being abused as a child.
I thought the false dream/questioning reality bit towards the end should have been extended. It would have been more interesting to leave the viewer hanging about what was real and what wasn't.
I think it's a film with a great, but unoriginal, idea that doesn't quite pay off. The torture scene is quite gruesome though. I will give it that.
"Deeper...deeper...deeper"
No comments:
Post a Comment