3. Audition (1999)
Shigeharu Aoyama is a wealthy widower whose son Shigehiko wants him to find happiness with a new woman. He teams up with Yasuhisa Yoshikawa, a film producer, who gets women to 'audition' for the role of Shigeharu's wife. Shigeharu takes a fancy to Asami but Yoshikawa has a bad feeling about her, being unable to collect references. Nonetheless Shigeharu pursues Asami despite the fact that the viewer is increasingly aware that Asami is a nutcase. She lives in an empty apartment with a sinister looking sack. She sits immobile for four days next to the phone waiting for Shigeharu to get in touch. They date for a while and when they get down to business, Shigeharu notices cuts on her body and she tells him she was abused as a child. He declares undying love for her. Asami goes missing. On the hunt for her, Shigeharu finds out all of her bosses met terrible ends. Asami goes to Shigeharu's place and spikes his drink. Via a flashback, we see a mutilated man crawling out of the sack in Asami's apartment. She barfs into a bowl and he hungrily eats it. Now she has Shigeharu at her mercy and some torture with needles and limb removal is on her agenda.. Possibly the most warped female character in the whole of J Horror, Asami is a true cold blooded, sadistic murderess and torturer. The scenes of limb removal are so appalling, even the staunchest J Horror fan will be squirming on their sofas while watching the atrocity. Many directors including Hostel director Eli Roth have testified to the film's influence upon their work and also to the nerve shredding effect the torture scenes had on them. A critically well regarded film, widely touted as Takashi Miike's finest movie, Audition makes you feel very sorry for Shigeharu. He is a well drawn character who is lonely and wants love but he should have insisted upon references! Not as violent as Miike's other pieces Ichi the Killer or Visitor Q, the gore is relatively scant in Audition, but when it gets underway, by golly does it make an impact. The whole way through the film, we are privy to information about Asami that Shigeharu doesn't have which creates narrative tension and makes the ending very scary because we have been speculating all along what misfortune Asami is going to give to Shigeharu. And it is every bit as bad as we feared, even more so...