A girl made the dude eat vomit...and?

Audition (Takashi Miike,1999)


This is a film that many have recommended me. Friends and critics loved this film and couldn't stop talking about it. I decided to watch the film for myself and those people can't be more wrong. Most people know the plot so I'm not going to get into details. Guy holds audition, girl that he picks is insane. Well, that's actually pretty much it.

Takashi Miike starts off with a premise that can be a passable horror film but yet fails in every aspect. The film starts off very slow and boring but Miike himself says that he deliberately structured it to be boring. No filmmaker wants their film to be boring, that's literally one of the stupidest things you can say and do. What he needs to accomplish because he obviously wasn't trying is to build suspense between the characters, make the characters interesting to watch, feel for the characters. Miike takes a ordinary nice guy that has a son and wants us to feel for him. Just because he's a nice guy doesn't give him character, Miike also has his wife die in the first scene to add more sadness and it doesn't work.

Audition then goes into shock horror, not jumps but shock. Miike believes that having a girl vomit into a bowl and making her slave eat it is horrifying. For myself, i didn't even find it disgusting like so many people have. I just watched the scene play out and i told myself "was i supposed to be disgusted by that?", i suppose if the audience is weak enough then they would find that scene disgusting and just because of that call it a masterpiece. That's the only reason why i could see anyone calling it a good film because there's obviously nothing else to it.

So many people cherish Miike for gross out scenes like the one i described in the paragraph above and i honestly don't see why. It's not that i don't get it because i obviously do but there is no basis for it. The scene comes literally out of left field and not only that, they have dream sequences that also come out of nowhere. Come on, he even has a dream sequence within a dream sequence. There's no reason for the dreams either, he tries to give explanation in the commentary but he doesn't even know what he's talking about.

Grade D-