Audition (1999)

“All words are lies. Pain doesn't lie."

This is a famously disturbing horror film that it’s taken me twenty years to see (1999 being twenty years ago is wrong on all sorts of levels) and it’s well worth it. A sweet if gently misogynistic drama for most of its length, the film suddenly piles on the torture towards the end as all the unthinking misogyny of the earlier scenes gets its extremely painful comeuppance. This is an interesting film to see in the wake of #MeToo.

The plot is simple; lonely widower Aoyama wants a new wife, the subtext being that he wants her to do all the traditional feminine jobs of looking after him and leaving him just to work, while needing to be accomplished herself. At a friend’s suggestion he takes part in a series of auditions for a part in a film which never happens, at which the women are asked a series of bizarre and impertinent questions by their male interlocutors.

Aside from the auditions themselves, though, the misogyny is constant but subtle as Aoyama settles on Asami, a mysterious woman whose true past and true proclivities and abused past are hidden behind an exterior that seems to be quite passive and traditionally feminine. And then she disappears, things are not quite right, the direction turns very unnerving and adopts the grammar of the horror film, and the torture begins. A haunting and highly effective film with a serious point, and the harsh revenge of the abused and objectified woman. Superb, and Eihi Shiina is magnificently disturbing.