Finally caught up with Audition, a Japanese horror film that may have been over-promised… but I ultimately found that a blessing. I’m not sure I could have handled a full two hour movie like the last twenty minutes of this flick which had been my impressions of it in advance. Not that I haven’t seen some extreme films in the past (looking at you, Martyrs) that I’ve “enjoyed”. But something about this film got under my skin… you might even say it went deeper. Deeper. Deeper.

The funny thing is, I thought I’d seen a chunk of this film in the past… and my memory says it starts out hard and gory. But whatever I had watched was certainly not this movie. Now I wonder what I HAD watched that had sadistic torture (and a wiggling bag). Oh well.

What the movie is actually surprised me. It starts out with a widowed middle aged man whose son wants him to re-marry. He finally agrees and gets talked into holding fake auditions for a movie promising young ladies stardom but is really just an audition to find a wife. He falls for one of the ladies… which then turns the movie from a slightly creepy romance into a mystery when she vanishes. And then it turns into a hallucinatory experience and a wicked sharp edged horror film.

To my surprise, the vast majority of the film is the first two parts: the romance and the mystery. It only slowly evolved into a horror film and I would have loved to have been surprised by the turn. But I knew going in the film’s reputation so I wasn’t shocked at the turn. I’ve seen a number of extreme horror and torture porn films but there’s something in the way this movie handled its body horror that bothered and disturbed me. Because it doesn’t show that much gore and splatter, instead relying on skin-crawling sound design and implication… and the chilling cheeriness of the sadist.

So, yeah, I enjoyed – or perhaps “enjoyed” – the film, partially because it wasn’t what I thought it was (two hours of torture) and was instead a relationship film and a mystery. And when it got to the “good parts”, I was cringing… and I’ve seen all the Hostels and all the Saws. It’s the fine difference between on-screen, high-intensity, in-your-face extreme practical effects and knowing what it takes to get “better” results more through what’s not shown as directly.

Score: 81