Audition

There are some films that you hear about and your told that it's the most amazing, horrifying thing that has even been put to film, and then when you finally see it, it changes the way you look at films forever. This film was so far beyond anything I could have expected, the changing of story gears from a drama to a horror is flawless and takes you completely unprepared. The mastermind behind this work of genius is Takashi Miike, who has the uncanny ability to take ordinary and familiar situations and turn them into something that is more sinister and frightening then we've even been witness to before.
A middle-aged man, who has been a widower for seven years, is coerced into using a phony film audition to meet women, and focuses on a young ballerina whose mysterious past contributes to her psychotic behavior. The calm and collected way that the story comes around to bite you is disturbing, you follow a nice relationship that seems to be like any one of a hundred that we've seen and then it turns on a dime before you know what's happening. This film shows the expert filmmaking of the director as well as the actors, with Eihi Shiina and Ryo Ishibashi in the lead roles we are driven through a full gambit of human emotion so that by the end we're thankful it's over but we're also left wanting more. The performance that Shiina gives is outstanding, the flip-flop of emotion and the character expressions are superb. From the moment that she comes on the screen as a shy submissive young woman to the psychotic maniac cutting off her lovers foot with razor wire we're exposed to a dizzying array of human emotion that disorients the viewer from one moment to the next.
This movie is not for the faint at heart, even though it starts out as a nice homey love story it later on becomes a film that a lot of people would be disturbed at watching. There are some scenes that are grotesque and hard to watch, and some that may give you nightmares, but the story itself is captivating and once your sucked in Miike doesn't allow you a chance to get away until the very end. In the grand scope of films what this movie does for blind dates is the same thing that Fatal Attraction did for infidelity in marriages, it makes you think two or three times before you take the next step. This movie does something special for this genre of films, even though most Asian horror films deal with the supernatural this one could take place next door to any of us and that alone is more chilling than most horror films.