Audition: A Dark Fable

I'm a fairly recent convert to the church of Takashi Miike, but after watching Audition, I knew it was something I'd have to cover during spooky season. One of the most notorious shockers of them all, Audition is hardcore viewing, but it's also one of the most wonderfully pitched, deeply disturbing and outright intelligent pieces of horror storytelling. And it's even more awesome because, for a good hour, it's not that scary. It's actually almost a romantic comedy, with a mild-mannered widower holding a fake audition to choose a woman to be his new wife. It's a little dishonest, sure, but his son and co-worker seem to think it's a good idea, so how bad could it be? Turns out, very, very bad. Audition is a pitch black cautionary tale, where our hero's ideal woman turns out to be something a little more dangerous

Of course that bait and switch is instrumental in making this movie work as well as it does. Obviously what Aoyama is doing is seedy, dishonest and wrong, and it's doing this that leads him onto a dark path. The film is a horror movie for the entirety of its run, and while those early scenes are almost entirely innocuous, they're subliminally setting up the pieces for one of the nastiest climaxes in cinema history. Audition, like the best horror movies, is a fable. It runs on fairy tale logic, where if you do the wrong thing, something awful will happen to you. Asami is one of the best characters in horror, because she's a total metaphor, terrifying not just in what she does, but also as the consequences she represents

The caution in this cautionary tale comes from what happens to men who don't respect women. Aoyama's not necessarily a bad person, but what he's doing is so dishonest and so disrespectful, pretty much duping these women so he can marry one of them. Asami represents what happens when men treat women as something to be obtained, and punishes Aoyama for his dishonesty with unimaginable torture. What she's doing is undoubtedly wrong, and sick, and awful, and completely unjustifiable, but in the logic of the fairy tale, it actually kind of makes sense. Think of the best fables. They work because at the centre of their stories is something so nasty, so unimaginably scary, because if the consequences weren't awful, you wouldn't take them seriously. Asami is those consequences. She's the unfathomable terror that awaits those who mistreat others. She is, to put it bluntly, a monster, and like the best monsters, she's made from a scary idea

But does this film's violence have to be so extreme? Well, yeah. The gore is relatively brief here, but it proves that sometimes a short, sharp shock works best. Audition eases you into the terror, not to lull you into a false sense of security, but to tease the terror out, to make you expect the absolute worst. And you know what? The absolute worst happens. This is horror, and film in general, at its most extreme, but if it wasn't, it definitely wouldn't work so well. This movie's pitch black scares are legendary, and they work because the entire film is structured around them. After all, if it wasn't this strong, would the lesson resonate as much? In a genre of vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts and killer tyres, Audition is a chilling reminder that the scariest thing in the world is people. Not just evil people like Asami, but also the choices that anyone's capable of making. The wrong decision could lead anyone into this web of pain and misery, so chose carefully....

"kiri kiri kiri kiri kiri"