Imagine the scene: A petite young woman, could be anywhere between 17 and 30 years old. She is strikingly pale with a heart-shaped face and jet-black hair, and struggles to maintain eye contact for more than a few seconds. She sits between two men who ask her generic questions, her replies are non-committal, the most revealing aspect she has disclosed is about how she is happy to have enough money to buy books and see movies. The not-unreasonable dreams of a normal young woman. She responded to a casting call for a film that will never exist, and she’ll change the course of one man’s life in an unimaginable way. In Takashi Miike's Audition, the enigmatic Asami (Eihi Shina) is offered a role by the much older Widower Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) in a film he intends to make. Without context, we’d believe this was the beginning of a dramedy.
The Omega Project, after the commercial success of Ringu, secured the right to Ryu Murakami's Auditon hired Takashi Miike to adapt the material. The film was shot over three weeks and when it was first screened at Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000, it had multiple walkouts
The humorous set-up, silly girls laughing and fake auditions, and what comes after always takes newcomers to Takashi Miike’s cult classic by surprise. Audition's conclusion might be one of cinema’s more shocking, visceral twists and unless you’re familiar with the source material, you’ll be reaching out for the nearest vomit bag or bucket. Asami is one of the most unlikely monsters in horror film history and legitimately terrifying and none of us is any closer to figuring out who she is or why she is capable of such depravity. So read on – you have been warned…
There has been an archetype-shattering change in Japan’s literary landscape. J-horror is now a fast-selling and far-reaching phenomenon and Western readers will undoubtedly be familiar with the work of Natsuo Kirino, Koji Suzuki, and Hideaki Sena. But perhaps one of the most compelling, grim, subversive, and extreme voices in Japanese crime/horror is Audition author Ryu Murakami. The novelist covers the kind of terrifying terrain his genre peers would stay away from involving desperate, cruel, and pathetic people navigating worlds fractured by misogyny, greed, and violence while upending crime scene procedural conventions. Murakami has a knack for getting as under-the-skin visceral as the filmmaking of Chan-Wook Park and Takashi Miike.
Murakami delivered his disturbing novel in 1997 and it was adapted by Miike in 1999. Audition might not necessarily be categorized as horror, but it does have some staples that will be familiar to viewers: an ominously gothic tone, an eerie rural setting, nightmare sequences, LOTS of inventive violence, and a fascinating antagonist. Takashi’s movie and Asami (the focal point of this article) constantly wrong the audience at every opportunity throughout the film.
After he eventually reaches her by phone, Aoyama and Asami meet up. After they’ve enjoyed the pleasures of each other's company and she shows him her scars, Asami demands he tell her he loves her. The following morning Asami is gone. Confused, he begins to look for her and makes some macabre discoveries about her former boss - and a woman who had been hacked to pieces. These scenes are intercut with clips of memory, torture, Asami watching waves on a beach, and a what-if exploring their dynamic in a ‘normal’ way. By now we know Asami is a human-hating psychopath with a soft spot for dismembering people who dare to walk all over her. Takashi Miike had this to say to Rachel Bowles about Asami: "She was a very important character for me. In the original novel, I think she’s there but being played by that actress, she realized… a lot scarier than the original novel. She really completely personified that fear, and it’s somebody that… It’s a fear that every man would probably see in her and somebody that wouldn’t want to meet in real life."
Asami broke the mold for evil female characters. She derives joy from inflicting pain and her motives remain unclear. For the most part, she is a completely blank slate. Outside of her interaction with Aoyama, we barely witness her speak to another soul. She keeps a man in a sack and feeds him vomit. There are sequences of a ballerina being tortured but is that actually her? She severs her stepfather’s head with a piano wire, so we know she must be really strong. The ambiguity of her evil is what makes her so compelling.
Asami is a refreshing villain in horror. Evil female characters always need to have some ham-fisted backstory to ‘explain’ why they are or do what they do. Abuse, or a dead child, or daddy issues, or trauma. It is a lazy compulsion to tack emotional motivation onto a female character. It can often be at its worst in the horror genre. Male villains can get on with the ‘job,’ whereas a female villain has to have an emotional reason for doing the same thing or explain why she is ‘driven’ to extremes or curious about committing a violent crime.
Apart from a few sequences, she's a shadow and utterly terrifying. A girl of few words who never explains why she carries out these barbaric acts of brutal torture and cruelty. Or where she even came from -- it is indicated she was involved in a dance academy, but we can never be 100% sure if this isn’t a nightmarish fantasy her warped mind conjured up. What is fascinating about Audition is that the key character is female and often depicted as grotesque or even downright evil. It is a movie that is refreshingly free of the feminist caricatures that are so prevalent in the arena of horror media and Miike effortlessly occupies the perspective of a fundamentally damaged woman and explores their capacity for cruelty and inflicting pain, without offering answers. He has created a movie of unadulterated malevolence: There is no catharsis here, no tidy resolutions. With not even a sliver of light in the darkness, what is left to salvage?