Audition 4K 1999 Ultra HD 2160p

A friend invites a widower to watch some girls auditioning for a film role. The last of the candidates makes a particularly strong impression on the guest “spectator” with her graceful movements (she attended ballet school) and her soulful expression. He jots down her phone number from her file and arranges a date. The girl sits in her apartment waiting for him. She is waiting for the hero. But there is someone else in the apartment besides the hostess. Someone, tightly wrapped in a blanket, is stirring on the floor. Someone who cannot be seen, but who shows faint signs of life. Someone who arrived at the enchantress’s place before the hero…

User Review

Burning, sharp, agonizing, devastating—yet also pleasurable, exhilarating, satisfying, ecstatic. What does pain taste like? By nature, it is bitter as wormwood, yet abnormally sweet, just like ketemf. Takashi Miike, with maniacal persistence, lures his victim into his sticky web—caressing, comforting, reassuring that everything will be fine—only to ultimately throw them onto the operating table with the intention of turning it into a dissection table. The torturer slowly sets about his psychopathic manipulations, as if savoring a meal with the composure of Hannibal Lecter, but in the next moment mutilates the victim, using medical wire instead of the usual scalpel to cut through flesh, bones, and blood vessels—and even the head. There is nothing more terrifying than hysteria in silence (Kim Ki-duk would undoubtedly have loved it!), just as there are hidden demons within the sweet-faced woman with her dark eyes, like the color of night. The delicate features of her gentle face are capable of turning even a pathological pervert into a sensitive romantic, yet it is a harmless middle-aged man—who lost his wife a few years ago and is raising his son alone—who falls into her trap. Wanting to find new love, he, with the help of his producer friend, organizes fake auditions, attracting young women, and quickly finds the one with whom he falls head over heels in love, as if under the influence of alcohol or epidural anesthesia, from which it will take him a long time to recover.

She will intoxicate him and say she wants to fill her insides with his penis, but she prefers thin neurons—she loves to rip them out, just like men’s tongues with their equally false promises. Yes, Miike will play on contrasts. After all, a woman should be like a good horror movie: the more room left for the imagination, the better—isn’t that right, Mr. Hitchcock? And so we must remember Herr Nietzsche’s admonition, which the widower has forgotten, turning himself into a guinea pig who, just like the one before her, is about to bend over like a trained animal and start slurping food from a bowl. Funny, isn’t it? And to some extent, that is exactly the case for the director: he plays with a deliberately surrealistic context no worse than Amenábar, only instead of the latter’s illusory and purely dramatic motifs, he prefers ironic and deceptive ones with hints of possible pathological love, with circumstances and characters so close and yet so far from everyday realities, to which the director prepares the viewer, only to then abruptly unleash a monstrous mishmash of domestic melodrama and brutal thriller, coupled with “unholy” horror and elements of meta-film, where that very illusory nature — the line between the mundane and bloody frenzy — is highlighted, where screen tests for a woman become tests for a man, tests for the viewer whom the director is so desperately trying to drive mad.

And if the film provokes laughter, it is purely nervous, as is likely the case with Miike himself, mocking his own hero, since the girl with sadistic tendencies is not so much a monster in the flesh as the embodiment of a feminist idea of power over men—retribution for a pretentious existence and imposed illusions. She is the ideological substance, the absolute of aggression, and a personal electroconvulsive therapy for the protagonist. But, as he explores her psychosexual nature—marked by endless loneliness, girlish suffering, and physical deprivation—Miike still feels pity for her—and, in part, for the caring man who allowed himself a little mischief. However, the film is built precisely around and for her—a beautiful and nightmarish little devil with a clouded mind and a past from which her demons crawled out and pierced her flesh with needles, staging a bacchanalia of flesh and blood, — when the body is paralyzed, limbs are amputated, and nerve endings reach the limit of their sensitivity, while dreams fade and hopes smolder at the speed of a rupturing arterial aneurysm, only the mind instinctively resists, refusing to accept the inevitability of death. But someday, perhaps, he will realize that the treacherous woman was his best lover, who quietly came from nowhere and silently told him far more than any words that breed lies—a lover with eyes in which one would want to drown and resurface as a completely different person, only to drown again. And even after she has gone to her nowhere, she will remain with him forever. Only pain can be trusted; only pain is genuine. Pain, terrible and sweet in the agonizing silence.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (80.2 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#Japanese: FLAC 2.0
#Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.0
#Japanese: FLAC 2.0 (Commentary by director Takashi Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan, hosted by Masato Kobayashi)
#English: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Commentary by Japanese Film Expert Tom Mes)
#English: FLAC 2.0 (Commentary by filmmakers Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce)

Info Subtitles