Vibe
Audition is famous for what happens late, which can distort memory of how carefully Takashi Miike constructs everything before it. Widower Shigeharu Aoyama is encouraged to date again and participates in a fake movie audition designed to let him review women as potential partners. He becomes fixated on Asami, whose apparent reserve seems to fit the image of vulnerability and refinement he has already decided he wants. Miike spends a long time letting the premise resemble a melancholy romantic drama. The ethical discomfort is present from the beginning—the audition is a deception and Aoyama’s selection process turns women into dossiers—but the film does not flash a warning sign every time he rationalizes it. That patience gives the later horror its force. As details in Asami’s story fail to verify, the film’s temporal and psychological stability begins to fracture. What makes Audition a major Movie Night film is not merely extremity; it is the experience of realizing that the movie you thought you were watching has been compromised by the assumptions of its protagonist. Eihi Shiina’s performance is central. Asami can appear almost motionless, forcing the viewer to project meaning onto small changes in posture and voice, then the film weaponizes that attention. The final section is difficult and physically upsetting, but it does not arrive from nowhere. It converts the earlier structures of looking, choosing and possessing into a horror scenario where control changes hands.
Watch for
- Watch how long Miike allows the film to behave like a restrained romantic drama; the tonal pivot works because the first mode is played sincerely.
- Notice how Aoyama and his friend discuss women during the audition process. The casual language of evaluation establishes the film’s power imbalance before any overt horror.
- Track the reliability of Asami’s biography—teachers, workplaces, injuries, addresses—and how each verification attempt makes the world less stable rather than more certain.
- Listen for the repeated “kiri-kiri-kiri” sound/phrase in the final section; BFI’s anniversary interview documents that part of its performance history was developed on set.
Production notes
BFI’s 25th-anniversary oral-history/interview records Audition’s world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival in late 1999 and its European premiere at Rotterdam in 2000, where the film’s extremity contributed to reported walkouts. The 1999 year in the locked ranking therefore reflects the film’s festival premiere even though some release databases emphasize 2000 theatrical circulation. Miike adapted Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel, with Daisuke Tengan writing the screenplay. BFI’s conversation with Miike and Eihi Shiina also clarifies that the notorious final movement was not simply an exercise in sadism from conception; performance choices, including aspects of the repeated vocalization, developed through collaboration. Modern Arrow releases document the film’s continued restoration and repertory life.
Trivia
- Audition premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in late 1999, which supports the locked 1999 ranking year.
- The film adapts Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel, with a screenplay by Daisuke Tengan.
- Ryo Ishibashi plays Aoyama and Eihi Shiina plays Asami.
- BFI’s 25th-anniversary interview records severe early audience reactions, including walkouts at its 2000 Rotterdam screenings.
- Miike described the film in the BFI anniversary conversation in terms of a love story as much as horror, a useful clue to why the first half is played so straight.
Legacy
Audition became one of Takashi Miike’s defining international films and one of the titles that announced a new wave of Japanese horror to festival and cult audiences around the turn of the millennium. Its legacy is often reduced to a handful of extreme images, but filmmakers and critics continue returning to its tonal architecture: the horror works because a conventional romantic premise has already normalized unequal looking and selection. The film also helped establish Miike internationally as impossible to classify—a director capable of restraint, comedy, melodrama and brutality within the same project. For Movie Night, it remains a deliberately challenging choice, but communal viewing intensifies exactly what made its early festival screenings famous: people discover together where their tolerance, sympathy and assumptions shift.