|
This is a textbook example of why not to watch a film in two halves. The first half is an interesting quasi-comedy
drama about a man who loses his wife & is left to look after his obeyant Japanese son. Hai! With everyone begging him
to move on and find another wife, his mate, a film & TV producer, cooks up the idea of an audition with the intention of
finding the right girl without having to sift through the detritus of speed daters. So what develops is a sort of
formal Eastern take on prankish American high school rom coms...and then I switched off.
Two weeks later when I finally got around to watching the second half, the film had gestated into a brutal, nightmarish
gorefest reminiscent of an alleged snuff movie I saw at university. It's got everything we've come to expect from the
Japanese school of cult filmmaking: excessive boundary-pushing terror, stomach-challenging gore, young girls in thigh-high boots
& rubber gloves doing unspeakably torturous things & a typically relaxed attitude to the whole thing.
Alongside Hideo Nakata (Ring 1 & 2, Dark Water), director Takashi Miike has earned himself a huge following in the West, and
if Audition (his breakthrough movie) is anything to go by, I can see why. Both filmmakers are at the centre of the current
horror renaissance (and you thought the genre was dead), and if this phalanx of far eastern auteurs are anything to go by, it looks as
if horror really has found a new home.
RATING: (c)Limer 2004
|
Audition (Terrestrial C4: December 2003)
