The Snake Egg: Audition at 25

The search for human connection: always a complex and fraught endeavor. Although rarely ending in dismemberment, strong feelings can occur!

Much like the lonely souls in Takashi Miike’s ice-cold masterpiece Audition, I feel I have much love to give and no one to give it to. I’m speaking, of course, on my love for extreme horror–the real master platters of splatter. I love it because it is brain-smashed schlock, violently uprooted from the doldrums and agonies of everyday life. Few films categorized as legitimately extreme could also be considered one of the greatest films of all time. This is a dividing line for many–it’s either one or the other.

When Ring kicked off an international J-horror craze in 1998, its producers clamored for new product. Having bought the rights to Ryu Murakami’s recently published novel Audition as an intentional swerve from their supernatural hit, they chose Miike specifically since he wasn’t a horror director. 

Born in Osaka, Japan in 1960, Miike was still relatively early in his career when he got the gig–a mere ten features, not counting direct-to-video work. (He’s now notched over 100.) But he’d already distinguished himself for his very weird, freewheeling yakuza flicks like Shinjuku Triad Society and Fudoh: The New Generation. The result became another landmark, but one very unlikely to get remade by Dreamworks as a PG-13 popcorn flick.

Audition’s protagonist, Aoyama, is a successful film producer. Played with great empathy by Ryo Ishibashi, he’s also a widower and a loving father to his teenage son. Years have passed since his wife’s death; he’s starting to feel old, lonely. “Everybody in Japan is lonely,” his editor smirks.

The film firmly plants itself in a rueful, negative mood from the jump. “Japan is finished,” Aoyama’s lizardy colleague Yoshikawa intones as they gaze across a half-empty bar at a table of giggling “common” girls. “Where are the nice ones?”

A snake egg of an idea is hatched. Yoshikawa offers to stage an audition for a project that’s going nowhere to help Aoyama find a quality mate…or a date at least.  After some stumbling resistance to the James Franco of it all, he agrees. What harm could come of it?

Officially released to the festival circuit in 1999, Audition only made its way to America in late summer 2001. But it was already preceded by its reputation, particularly the climactic torture scene. As a burgeoning horror nerd and film school student, I found the earliest showing I could. The theater was small, the crowd cultishly sparse. A couple sat up front, curiously out of place for a movie that had otherwise attracted loner weirdos like myself.

From the maudlin hospital-bedside opening to the toxic Neil LaBute-isms of the first act, the film bolts through tones and aesthetics. The jazzy montage of the audition itself plays like a dark parody of a romantic comedy, rapid-cut in leering flashes.

At the end of the fake audition, Aoyama finally meets Asami. A demure, very available 24-year-old, who fits his preconceived ideal wife replacement disturbingly well. Model Eihi Shiina is a revelation in her first acting role, building a performance in layers that terminate in the porcelain-smooth surface presented in this scene.

As the film progressed, I felt fully immersed but also registered a feeling of rising dread in the theater. An atmosphere that something beyond horror movie convention would eventually happen that would make us all feel really, really bad.

I’ll save the plot summary but, with about twenty minutes to go, there was a commotion toward the front row as someone noisily walked out, followed quickly by another.  When the credits rolled and we loner weirdos trickled into the lobby, the normie couple was still arguing over the day’s choice of entertainment. Life is full of strange moments like this.

 Everyone’s a critic. Personally, I left elated that I had watched something pure, new, and visionary. Ryo Ishibashi nails the smug entitlement beneath his character’s bland likeability, and Miike zeroes in on all the cringe that goes with that.  Eihi Shiina’s transformation from virginal introvert to rubber-aproned torture angel is iconic for a reason. The final act flows in a non-linear haze of memory and nightmare, as precisely edited as a Nicolas Roeg film. (Roeg’s Bad Timing competes with this for one of the roughest movie endings ever.)

That same year, Miike managed to top himself with the indescribable crime epic/superhero parody Ichi the Killer, often mislabeled as horror for the sheer audacity of its vibe. In the grip of Miike-mania, I found a showing during its early festival run. There, the walkouts started during the credit sequence. (If you know, you know.)

At this point I should have gotten the gist: don’t put a Miike movie on at a party. But when Audition dropped on DVD, guess what? It was a Halloween party, but still–terrible reception. Walkouts hit differently at a party.

A few years later I got a taste of my own medicine. My lifelong search for meaning through mind-altering horror led me to a small, dark apartment, sitting through Cannibal Holocaust with some hometown pals. We were all thoroughly disgusted, but the trauma bond afterward was curiously satisfying. This is not a good reason to watch Cannibal Holocaust.

Miike’s star continued to rise in the new millennium. He got a cheeky cameo in Eli Roth’s torture porn breakout Hostel. Quentin Tarantino acted in his 2007 psycho Western Sukiyaki Western Django. His new films are distributed by Warner Brothers, parked in the Netflix stables. He’s part of the establishment, maybe second only to Gaspar Noé for bringing truly transgressive imagery to the edge of the mainstream.

Is Audition still a sick, heavy lift, 25 years later? Its shock has understandably dulled as its legend has grown. Today, bludgeoning images of violence, real and imagined, pervade our media and rattle our skulls into obeisance constantly. They irradiate the walls in our homes.

The film has aged extremely well, so nuanced in its exploration of human nature that it’s been analyzed as both feminist and misogynistic. Audition asks uncomfortable questions from disorienting perspectives, building up to the coup de grace of its devastating final shot. Maybe what’s ultimately so off-putting to some is the film’s deep current of existential dread, judgment and punishment, coiled like a hissing snake amid its more recognizable genre trappings. Throw it on at your next Halloween party and find out.

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