Audition

A widower stages a fake film audition to meet women. It works.

The first hour is a gentle, well-mannered romantic drama, shot flatly, moving slowly, with a slightly sad middle-aged man being encouraged by a friend. Audiences at early festival screenings walked out during this section out of boredom, which Miike has said he found funny.

The register break is the point and it is engineered. There is a single shot involving a sack in an apartment that arrives with no warning and is the moment the film stops being what you thought.

The last twenty minutes are among the hardest things to sit through in this category, and the reason they work is that the film earned them across an hour of nothing happening.

Eihi Shiina is extraordinary and the sound design does most of the damage. Miike has never made anything else this controlled.