Ôdishon

Plot synopsis:
Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower who lost his wife to an illness seven years prior, is urged by his 17-year-old son, Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki), to begin dating women again. Shigehiko is somewhat doubtful of his father's love life, but plans to move out when he finishes school and does not want his father to be alone. Aoyama's friend and colleague, Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), a film producer, devises a plan to hold a mock-audition, in which young, beautiful women would audition for the "part" of Aoyama's new wife, under the impression that they are auditioning for a new film, but actually so Aoyama can marry one of the finalist contestants.Aoyama is immediately enchanted by Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), a 24-year-old woman with a soft voice and reserved, yet confident, mannerisms. In her audition, Asami says that she was once a ballerina headed for greatness, but had to give up dancing after an injury. Aoyama, still reeling from the death of his wife, is attracted to her apparent emotional depth.Yoshikawa warns him about Asami, saying that he has a bad feeling about her. None of the references on her résumé were able to be reached and her job history is shaky. The music producer she claimed to work for had gone missing. Unfortunately, Aoyama is so enthralled by her inner and outer beauty that he is blinded by his feelings for her.She lives in an empty apartment, furnished only with a sack and a telephone. Four days following the audition, she sits perfectly still in the middle of the floor next to the telephone, waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, the sack lurches across the room and makes gurgling sounds. She ignores it as she waits a few rings before answering.When Asami answers the phone, she confesses to Aoyama that she never expected him to call. After several dates, she agrees to accompany him to a seaside hotel. Once at the hotel, Asami tells Aoyama about the abuse she suffered as a child and shows him the burn scars on her body. Asami asks Aoyama to love only her. Aoyama promises to do so and they make love.The next morning, Aoyama is awakened by a telephone call; it is the front desk wondering if, since his companion left, he too would be checking out. He realizes Asami is nowhere to be found. Using her résumé, Aoyama searches in vain for her.Aoyama visits the old ballet studio where Asami claimed to have trained for 12 years. He finds that the studio is now inhabited only by a disabled old man in a wheelchair with artificial feet. It is revealed that the man caused the burn scars on Asami's legs.Then he goes to the bar where Asami used to work and someone tells him that it has been closed for a year because the woman who was in charge, the wife of a record producer, was found dismembered. When the police put her body back together, they found 3 extra fingers, an extra ear, and an extra tongue.Asami goes to Aoyama's house during his search. Once there, she finds a photo of his dead wife. Enraged, she slips a sedative in his drink and hides. Aoyama comes home, has a drink and faints. The movie cuts to a sequence about Asami's past and present. In one scene, The contents of the sack are revealed to be a man missing both feet, his tongue, one ear and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out of the sack and begs for food. Asami vomits into a dog dish and places it on the floor for the man. The man sticks his face in the bowl of vomit, and hungrily consumes it.A while later, Asami returns to the drugged and paralyzed Aoyama. As she walks into the room, the audience sees the twisted body of Aoyama's pet dog. She proceeds to inject Aoyama with an agent that paralyzes his body, but keeps his nerves alert. She then tortures him with needles in his abdomen and under his eyes. As she is torturing him, she tells him he is just like everyone else in not being able to love only her. She talks about how he has many whom he loves in his life, mainly his son. She says that she has only him and that this is not acceptable, because then he will never be completely hers. Her torture of him, she explains, is to teach him the meaning of needing someone. She tells him that, "words cause lies, pain can be trusted." She then cuts off his left foot with a wire saw.While Asami begins to cut off his other foot, she is surprised by Aoyama's son returning home. She hides and prepares to attack him. He discovers his father on the floor, turns, and is surprised by Asami. Suddenly Aoyama has a dream that he is waking up and that the past events have been a dream, to just after he and Asami had made love for the first time. She says that she accepts his marriage proposal, despite him never actually proposing, and says that she is the heroine of his life. He awakes from this dream to see his son swing around and Asami fail to disable him. Shigehiko runs up a flight of stairs to escape her and she follows him, he kicks her down the stairs, breaking her neck. Aoyama tells his son to call the police. As Aoyama lies in agony on the floor, he continues to stare at the dying figure of Asami on the floor, her neck is broken in a way that she is facing him. She mutters things that she had told him earlier about waiting for his call, and being excited to see him again. He is overcome with sadness as he remembers his answer to her in his dream sequence about her abuse, that "It's hard to forget about...but someday you'll feel...that life is wonderful."

Tags: cruelty, murder, cult, violence, flashback, psychedelic, suspenseful, sadist

Review:
Art-house horror flicks are not a very common genre (few come to mind except 'Don't Look Now') but Takashi Miike's film 'Audition' is a welcome addition to the canon.
The early stages of this film resemble a work by Claude Sautet, only seen through a Japanese sensibility, about the relationship between an older man and a beautiful young woman, but there's something slightly discomforting both in the man's definition of the perfect partner, and in the person he finds who fulfills it.
The result is utterly beguiling,  and one can even see similarities with Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' in 'Audition's' portrayal of a man's complicit relationship with hell.In some ways, this is not a universal film and I could not imagine it working in English: can you envisage any Western actress speaking the Eihi Shiina's lines with a straight face?.
But this is the director's fault; when you set out to shock your audience as much as Takashi Miike does in this film, you can't blame the audience if all they remember about your film is the shocking part.Which is a shame, because "Audition" is quite a bit more than a mere horror movie.
In fact, in structure and tone, this film reminded me of Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," and if Lynch didn't have his own unique style and brand of film-making, I might wonder if he was inspired in part by this film when he made his own.What other comments here have done nicely is summarize what "Audition" is "about." A man (Shigeharu Aoyama) mourning the loss of his wife looks to find the perfect woman to replace her, and he holds bogus auditions for an ostensible film role in order to find her.
This dilutes the violence of the film's final moments, because there is a strong suggestion that this violence is taking place in the protagonist's nightmares.Is "Audition" a critique of the confined roles women are forced to inhabit in Japanese society?
Takashi Miike's "Audition" has to be one of the best Japanese horror movies I have ever seen.Ryo Ishibashi plays Shigeharu Aoyama,a lonely middle-aged man.After many years of being loyal to his deceased wife is the right time to begin dating again.His friend Yasuhisa decides to set up a fake casting audition in hopes that his friend can find new wife.Aoyama then goes through countless portfolio's looking for women to audition,but as soon as he sees the beautiful Asami's picture he knows that she is the one.Soon they begin dating.Everything seems perfect at first,but is Asami all that she seems?"Audition" isn't as violent and outrageous as "Fudoh" or "Ichi the Killer",but it certainly delivers some of the most harrowing scenes of violence ever captured on screen.The film is atmospheric and artistic,so if you're looking only for gore and violence avoid this one like the plague.However if you're a fan of Miike's works this masterpiece is not to be missed.10 out of 10..
Personally you wouldn't mind a fair portion of violence and chills, but you suspect and worry that the other half prefers a slow and story-driven film with the emphasis on character development.
Aoyama's life subsequently turns into a psychological nightmare, yet the film's main strongpoint is how Miiki never fully reveals whether this girl is a lethal psychopath out for vengeance against the entire male race or that all the horror exclusively spawns from the protagonist's guilt and paranoid mindset.
At several moments during the first hour of the film, when the relationship between the two lead characters laboriously develops, you really wonder yourself how such a sober and melodramatic love story could possibly transgress into a reputedly shocking horror film, but it does!
There are a few brutal images and scenarios, but they arrive primarily towards the end of the film, and they tend to be more conceptually disturbing than graphically violent.Audition is the story of Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who is living alone with his son, Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki), after his wife, Ryoko (Miyuki Matsuda), passes away.
Audition explores Asami's story and her relationship to Shigehiko.It's a good hour, at least, before anything very out of the ordinary happens in the film, and even when that time does arrive, the strange occurrences are extremely subtle at first.
That's because so far, every Miike film I've seen has a completely different style (the other two I've watched to date are Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1) and Happiness of the Katakuris (Katakuri-ke no kôfuku), both from 2001).But as a realist drama that ventures into romance and slight mystery/thriller territory during its first half, Audition is a fine piece of art--you just have to know what to expect.
We view quite a few scenes from a distance--the camera is sometimes even placed in a room adjacent to the main action; there is a great hand-held tracking shot following Shigeharu and Yasuhisha through their office from behind partitions ala James Whale's Frankenstein (1931); an important "repeated scene" in a restaurant that gives us another psychological angle, with significantly altered dialogue, is shot at a distance; in the dénouement, another repeated dialogue scene with shifted meaning is shot from another room, and so on.Of course, the main attraction for most folks, at least in my part of the world, is the more mysterious and visceral material that enters in the second half, as the majority of Miike fans tend to be horror fans.
For awhile, Miike, Murakami and scriptwriter Daisuke Tengan (whom Miike amusingly says must have "been on drugs" when he wrote Audition, because the script was so weird--he implies that he tried to "normalize" it a bit) play with audience expectations as Audition threatens to become a more standard relationship thriller, then a ghost story, then a rubber reality film (all of these things are implied in turn during one of the best extended sequences of the film), and finally, we realize that it's more about a psychotic villain.
"Audition" is a great horror movie with a creepy, disturbing and even realistic story but with less violence, weirdness and gore than the usual, for a movie directed by the Japanese director Takashi Miike.
It is in fact closer to the more extreme moments of David Cronenberg, and the profoundly disturbing movies of Jorg Buttgereit, Shinya Tsukamoto, and Gaspar Noe. Directed with great flair by Takashi Miike, and based on a novel by the amazing Ryu Murakami ('Almost Transparent Blue' and 'Coin Locker Babies'), 'Odishon' wipes the floor with Hollywood's recent output of supposedly "confronting" movies ('American Psycho', 'Boy's Don't Cry', 'Requiem For A Dream') and by-the-numbers serial killer thrillers ('Hannibal', 'Kiss The Girls', 'The Cell',etc.).
Forget those safe, mediocre bores THIS is the real deal!Miike lulls you into a false sense of security with his leisurely storytelling and quiet character development, which makes the pay off of the last part of the movie even more shocking and unexpected.
Movies like Scream, I Know What you Did Last Summer, and their teenage-pheremone-reeking ilk have absolutely no right to call themselves "horror movies" when we have a film like Audition to watch.This movie starts out very slowly, very sweetly, and builds to a fantastic gruesome climax that you don't see coming.
The acting greatly outclasses both the story and the directing, and is the only thing that keeps a movie that could (and should!) have been told in a 15 minute independent film from becoming tedious and unwatchable.In the movie's defense, I can see how it might appeal to people who liked, perhaps, "Raye makhfi" or similar movies, but it certainly wasn't what I was expecting, especially after having read many rave reviews of this "horror movie." Unfortunately, it tries to be too many things to too many people, and ultimately fails at them all..
Asian horror has the same elements of suspense and tension as American, but the way they build a story is different, so you usually don't know what to expect in these films.
Nearing the end of a film, you go from a slow paced movie to frantic, non-linear montage with some shock horror elements, the only real "scary" moments in the movie.
I saw this movie recently based on the recommendation of a few friends and several online sites ranking it one of the most frightening and disturbing films of all time.
The pacing of the film is all wrong and serves to bore the audience into a stupor for over an hour just so it can shock them with 20 minutes of gore at the end.
"Audition" would also benefit greatly from being from a re-cut to make it shorter, tighter and quicker paced.If you are looking for a shocking and disturbing experience there are literally hundreds of better films to choose from.
Then, in the second half, there is a scene of shocking violence that goes on forever and plays like you are watching a well photographed snuff film.
Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) lost his wife Ryoko (Miyuki Matsuda) seven years ago, and his son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) suggests that he is looking old, and should remarry.His friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) suggests they hold an audition to find someone that meets his qualifications.As soon as he read the resume for Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina - Tokyo Gore Police), he knew she was the one.He starts seeing her, and one day she disappears.
But before that happens, what could be called a mind-f***er occurs through Miike going through what could be either a dream, a hallucination, or both, which leads up to that scene in Aoyama's house.3/4 of the film moves along with something of a convention in the center of it- a girl who the protagonist falls for (er, SHE is the heroine of the story, so to speak, as she later says) who might not really be right for her, even as he can't sense it.
These scenes are done full-force through the more particular choices given earlier in the film with lighting and editing, and it's a fine contrast between those brief, shocking moments, and then the real horror that befalls when the style goes back to 'normal' as it were.
Even worse, one unnecessarily drawn out scene towards the end actually started to make me feel a little queasy (and I'm usually indifferent to violence), perhaps not solely because of what was happening on screen but also because it was the point where I realised what Odishon was all about.To the movie's credit, the acting was quite good and overall I thought it was filmed well.
On the plus side, Odishon generally avoids horror film clichés although it has the unfair advantage of a lack of action.So, in summary, Odishon is basically an hour and a half of a well acted but dull romance movie followed by half an hour of drawn out violence for the sake of violence.
I've literally seen more graphic violence in Star Wars, rated PG.As long as brainless people acclaim brainless movies like this just because they're Japanese, true horror isn't made.
Touted as "one of the most controversial films of all time" by RadioTimes, i was expecting tension and shocks; big things which ultimately Audition fails to deliver.Lots of people talk of the final third of the film and how fantastically clever it is, but these people fail to recall how poor the rest of the film is.
Then towards the end the whole story takes a turn, when you find out the woman is a psycho, it surprises you that what makes a superb horror movie.
The point where you see her torturing her victims that's when you see her true evil side that makes her an new wave of psycho villains.The sweet innocent looking insane women villainsIn conclusion, this film is a very unique style of horror genre that put Japanese horror directors on the Hollywood map..
I even found myself repeating "It's only a movie, it's only a movie." Towards the end.The film drags a bit at the start, but stick with it, the audition process can only be described as a great bit of cinema, and is throughly entertaining to watch.
I'd like to think they actually happened myself but you will have to make up your own mind upon seeing the movie.It's well acted and beautifully filmed 'Audition' has earned a place in my heart as being one of the great Japanese films of our time.
This is easily Takashi Miike's best, and most unsettling, film to date, and he does it (mostly) without all the 'goo' he's normally associated with.An aging business man decides (after some prodding from his son) that he should start looking at re-marrying.
Being a middle-aged business man makes it hard for him to simply go out and meet girls, so his friend (a film producer) comes up with the idea of holding an audition for a quasi-real movie that he can use to meet some women.
By the time all surrealistic hell breaks loose the movie has you and won't let go.For a character driven piece like this, even Miike's direction couldn't have saved it if the writing and acting weren't up to par.
The girl is much the same way in generating mixed emotions; she is unnerving and just 'not right', but she seems so sweet and innocent that you really want the two of them to end up happy.For want of not making this sound like some melodrama, read this; I have never heard two grown men scream so loudly watching a movie.
was really painful.First of all the movie is paced so slowly that it kinds of puts off track and then last 30 minutes just blows you off, with a last few scenes taking the cake.I don't think any other remake from any language would make the same kind of impact this movie did.A serious art house horror flick with decent acting from all of them.I give this one a 9/10 just for sheer crazy ending it provided...............
As the story begins to unfold, and you expect the film to do justice to its horror category, it falls flat on its bloody face and ventures into a near stomach-turning half-assed sado-orgy.
Japanese horror tends to generally start off with a decent-sounding plot, but by the middle or end of the movie, it all falls apart and just ends up making no sense.
Audition is no different.Other than a disturbing scene towards the end, this movie isn't even horror.
It's like there were some leftover violent scenes from another movie and they were pasted in.Add a clichéd ending and you have this complete load of junk.Is this a reflection of the weird side of Japanese psyche?
i never thought of any horror movies could be created like this brilliant Japanese film.i was obliged to changed my mind about Japanese movies.at first the story begins very simply.a widower arrange a fake audition with his producer friend to get a new wife for him.
she has brutal past that changed her mind..........the end of the movie is horrifying.all characters act nicely, especially, i want to mention eihi shiina(asami),she plays as a brilliant actress in this movie.welcome her to the world cinema!another characters are good as parts of this filmand i want to give a lot of thanks to Mr.takashi miike to direct such a nice psychological horror movie for us.well, this movie is not for all audiences.i would like to rate this movie: 10 out of 10..
It's just a vignette about a lonely widower who makes the mistake of falling in love with a macabre and sadistic woman and pays the price for it.Heck, I wouldn't even classify this film as good hack-em-slash-em horror.
Director Takashi Miike weaves a tale of an aging widower who holds a fake film audition in hopes of meeting the perfect woman; his intentions are sincere, and he seemingly finds his match in Asami, a physically and psychologically damaged 24-year old who hides a dark past...or does she?
"Audition" is a finely crafted masterpiece in horror and the film that helped establish the illustrious career of the infamous Takashi Miike.
If you have seen and liked the other films Takashi Miike has done or you think you're ready for something more intense than you are used to, this is a must see movie.
The contrast between the beginning of the film that almost feels like a light-hearted romantic fairy tale and the conclusion that turns into a mentally and physically violent horror movie is made in a unique, profound and detailed way.
Audition is an excellent film from the Japanese director, Takashi Miike.
The worst part about it is you don't even know it's going to be a horror movie for the first hour or so.The film is about Aoyama.
Audition is not for pussies who watch Scream and think crap like The Sixth Sense is the scariest movie of all time.
The film overall seems to have more "hype" than it does "substance".The movie is worth watching, but probably best viewed by an audience who doesn't know too much about the plot beforehand.
What's the point of making a 100 minute long film that gives the viewer nothing but the unpleasant feeling that comes with watching the main character suffer?
Doesn't have the look or feel of a horror film until some time into the movie, and even then the fragments that find their way to the surface are more nightmarish and haunting than jump up suspense.
This slow development will definitely be a turn off for those attracted by the film's (or Miike's) famous use of disturbing violence, but it's actually what makes the whole movie more powerful, as it builds up its plot in the sense that one completely becomes submerged in Aoyama's obsession with Asami in a similar way that Hitchcock's "Vertigo" did decades before.Takashi Miike's ambiguous masterpiece plays with the established film genres breaking the normal conventions in a surreal way.
When the movie takes its inevitable turn towards brutal horror we find the events happening to people that the audience has emphasized with - that's what makes the brutal occurences much more gruesome than those happening to one dimensional characters in other films.