Group Stages – Round 1: Diarios de Motocicleta (ARG) vs Audition (KOR)
The second half: A lonely Japanese widower (Ryo Ishibashi) whose son (Tetsu Sawaki) is planning to move out of the house soon expresses his sadness to a friend and fellow film producer (Jun Kunimura), who becomes inspired to hold an audition for a non-existent film so that the widower can select a new potential bride from the resulting audition pool. The widower ultimately becomes enamored with and fascinated by one particular young woman (Eihi Shiina)…but first impressions can often be horribly wrong…. – IMDB.com
Before I saw this movie, I heard from someone who had seen it before that it was extremely freaky and that I should be prepared. He was right but wrong at the same time. Audition is very freaky but really only in the last thirty minutes or so. The acting is good, the story is good and the gore and blood is amazing (but as I said only in the last thirty minutes or so).
The acting in this movie is good all around but I have to recognize a special person in this movie. Eihi Shiina plays the character of Asami Yamazaki perfectly. Asami Yamazaki to me is a schizophrenic who has two personalities. There is the shy, beautiful former ballet dancer who just wants to be in a movie and there is also the crazy, abused and disturbed mind of a psychotic serial killer. The way she switches between these two personalities in this movie is fantastic. Whenever she is out with Aoyama, she’s the first and when she’s at home by herself and in the last thirty minutes she is the other. It shows her skill as an actress, to smoothly switch between two characters.
As I said above, the story is good. A man who has been single for seven years is too scared to go back into the dating world, so his best friend and colleague sets up an audition using his criteria for a woman as the prerequisites. Around halfway through the movie, Asami disappears without a trace, sending Aoyama on a hunt to find her. This helps us learn a lot about her past. However, doing this took way too long. The gore at the end of the movie was well done but it took too long to get to it. The entire first hour and a half could be shorted to just an hour or maybe an hour and ten minutes making the already well anticipated gore better.
My other real problem with this movie is the ending. I am not going to go into character specifics but when one character is chasing another character up a flight of stairs and one stray kick from the character being chased sends the other character flying into the air and landing dead at the bottom of the stairs ending the movie, that is just lame. I mean, you really couldn’t do better than that?
Overall it is a pretty scary and very freaky movie that horror and suspense fans will enjoy.
IMDB says 7.4/10
RT says 77%
I say 7.5/10
The result: Argentina wins. Argentina 8 – 7.5 South Korea
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