While I really liked this, I am very confused as to what actually took place during the last 30-45 minutes. Being that I have to read subtitles, could mean that maybe some of what happened was, quite literally, lost in translation. For it's genuine creep factor this movie is still gonna get a decent score regardless of my misunderstandings of some things. Asami has a lot of style but I swear if she said deeper even one more time, I was prepared to toss my laptop across the room.

One of Miike's subtlest and most nuanced films, most of which is obliterated in most discussions of the film by a focus on the outrageously gory climax. A widower decides to remarry and is lured into a plan by his friend ... they will stage a fake audition for an actress and he'll use this to find a prospective bride. He finds a young woman who meets all his criteria, but she comes with some mighty baggage. This film is often spoke of as if it's a straightforward revenge scenario ... this man pays the price for his sexist ways ... but it's really quite a bit subtler than that. In a way, it's really about a man who has disconnected from the world after his wife's death being forcibly reconnected to another person, partly due to his own callous misdeeds, but also due to her legitimate desire to connect with him on her own terms. So ... it's really kind of a love story.

Seven years after the death of his wife, Shigeharu Aoyama (an excellent performance from Ryo Ishibashi) is urged by his son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) to start dating other women. After the tragedy of his wife's death, the film then becomes almost a light comedy, as the two of them (and the dog, Gangu!) attempt to match-make the clearly floundering Shigeharu. After seeing a parade of women as part of an 'audition' to be his next wife, the stunning, demure (and a very young looking 24 years of age) Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), dressed entirely in white, utterly beguiles him, and it seems as if the feeling is mutual.Shigeharu is a well-meaning, otherwise contented man with a genuinely warm-hearted family. Asami was a ballet dancer but damaged her hip, and yet otherwise seems very enigmatic; she lives alone in a flat with a phone and a curiously omnipresent sack … that moves. Shigeharu's investigations lead to a morass of deepening mystery regarding all who knew Asami – at the dance studio she claimed to frequent is a man with prosthetic feet, the owner of a bar where she used to work was murdered (his recovered body was recovered alongside extra fingers, tongue and an ear, which fuels Shigeharu's nightmares).The contrast between the increasingly bizarre snapshots of Asami's life and the pleasant mundanity that is Shigeharu's life give a deliberately disjointed sense to the film: truly, we do not know where (if anywhere) the narrative is going, and what is going to happen next. Which is probably just as well.Asami's sack contains a dog-like creature missing the body parts found by the police following the death of the bar owner; she sits alone and silent awaiting his every phone call. Perverse and abusive flashbacks that may be dreams show the girl tortured and abused. When one day he doesn't call, her anger takes on excruciating levels.In a finale that will stick in the mind of anyone who has seen 'Audition', Shigeharu is drugged and falls to the floor of his living room, unable to move. Gangu is killed, and the warmth of the Aoyama family home is corrupted as Asami emerges, dressed in long leather gloves and apron, carrying an array of needles and torture implements.Very slowly and methodically, she inserts needles into his eyes and begins to cut off one foot, before moving onto the other. The delicacy and deliberation with which she carries out these paralysing punishments are filmed in meticulous detail and the results are painful even to watch. He is paying the price for not devoting himself entirely to her, as others have done in the past ('All words are lies, pain doesn't lie').The film has been heralded for inciting the 'torture porn' style of projects like 'Saw (2004)' and 'Hostel (2005)', and yet remains more effective than any of them for not giving any clue or indication as the depths of the depravity unleashed toward the close. Truly shocking, hauntingly beautiful and not easily forgotten.

AUDITION is a film I knew little about before watching - modern Japanese cinema is something I'm not very knowledgeable about and Japanese "horror" films even less so. I had heard about AUDITION being extremely dark, brutal and disturbing with some amazing twists during its cinema run, so out of curiosity I had to rent it. What I got was a mixed movie, sometimes gripping but definitely not one I would call "entertaining" to watch. For the first hour and twenty minutes, it's a slow-paced tale of romance with some mystery aspects which keeps you watching through some interesting, subdued direction from Takashi Miike. This gives the film its realistic edge, and it also incorporates some strong acting on the parts of the two leads; Ryo Ishibashi creates a portrait of a sad, lonely middle-aged man so that you have a ton of sympathy for his character and can relate to his desperation. In comparison, Eihi Shiina's almost unearthly look - there is something very fragile and beautiful about her - sits well with her mysterious and unexplained character whom nobody else in the film seems to know much about. Shiina is excellent in the role and deserves to go on to a big career in Japan.For the first hour and twenty minutes - normally the running time for a "normal" Western film - there isn't much horror here to tell about, other than a few flashy disturbing images of a severed tongue slapping on the floor, a man getting his head slowly and deliberately sliced off, and a great shock sequence involving a moving bag. Then, at around that eighty minute mark, the film begins to change and become colder and disturbing. Dreams are mixed with reality to create a visually confusing film and Miike delights in tormenting the viewer with a hideous image of a man in a sack with no feet and few fingers. You begin to wonder what the hell is going on, and then the films ends ambiguously making you wonder whether what you just watched really happened or not.Before that ending comes one of the strongest - in terms of physical torture - segments of a film that I've yet to see, which is tough to sit through. Basically it's a scene of a paralysed Ishibashi being slowly and deliberately tortured by Shiina, who delights in getting as much pain as possible from her victim. First via the use of strategically-inserted needles, and then in the film's most stomach-churning moment, she actually saws his foot off - in graphic detail. This is far stronger and darker stuff than many of the shoddy and amusing video nasties that were prosecuted in the early '80s, yet is released uncut today in Britain - it shows how much our society has changed. The realism of this sequence makes it pretty nauseous and you can't help but be grateful when it's all over. So did it really happen? I don't know, and I don't plan on watching this film again anytime soon to find out. It's very interesting stuff and highly disturbing, as well as being well-made, but an entertaining movie it is not.