AUDITION is like a very special special episode of "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," one in which Bill Bixby's new romance spirals into a hellish nightmare of torture, hallucination, madness, and death. Hey, it's Takeshi Miike: what do you expect?
AUDITION begins like a somber "starting over" tale. A man loses his wife, then is left to raise his boy as best he can. After about a decade, his son's constant encouragement to find another wife finally wears him down and he hatches a plan to audition potential mates, hoping to find that diamond in the rough. He finds something that gleams, but it could be the tip of a blade. It's good setup for a movie, and Miike plays it well, investing us in his Bixby and taking his time to build the tension in the latter half of the film. If I have one gripe about AUDITION, it's the movie's overreliance on filters to set moods and create atmosphere. It's a good thing I'm not colorblind - if I had trouble seeing blue, I'd have missed half the movie.
This is a quibble, however. AUDITION is sweet, scary, horrifying, and satisfying. I wish Bill Bixby was still around for a remake.
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