Review of Audition

Introduction

Audition`s story follows a man whose wife tragically dies, leaving him with their young son to bring up. Years later, he decides that he wants to marry again, but doesn`t want to go through the normal process of finding a new wife. Instead, a friend who makes films convinces him to hold a series of auditions for a fictitious film in order to find the perfect woman. After going through the application forms, one girls stands out from the crowd, and after auditioning 30 girls, his mind is still set and he goes about starting a relationship. However, he becomes drawn into something he hadn`t bargained for...

Video

Like the movie, the picture is dark and depressing, and at times really not very good at all - with a great deal of film grain, not much detail and limited contrast.

The film is subtitled and despite advances in the grammar of subtitles in recent years, it`s not much use having grammatically correct and properly spelt subtitles if for long periods. As usual, this is caused by the white text having been positioned over a white or light coloured background...a shaded grey band behind the text would have helped matters dramatically!

Visually, the film is pretty run of the mill, with nothing out of the ordinary until the last scene, which is particularly grizzly and the reason for the film`s notoriety, and 18 certificate.

Audio

The video isn`t wonderful and unfortunately, the sound isn`t much better - the Dolby Digital Stereo track has limited range and really isn`t helped by background hiss and general low fidelity sound.

Luckily it won`t be necessary for the majority of viewers of this disc to listen to the dialogue, but you`ll have seen my grumbles about the subtitles in the video section...

Features

Extras consist of star and director filmographies, film notes, an interview with Mike Takeshi and trailers.

The disc is packaged in a black Amaray case, and my copy did not have any inserts detailing chapter breaks.

Conclusion

Like so many other notorious movies, the reputation of this film is based almost entirely on one scene, which really is particularly gruesome, and certainly contained an image that didn`t go out of my head very quickly. I had several flashbacks as I drifted off to sleep last night, and it was vivid in my mind as I described the gory details to my colleagues this morning.

Other than that, this film has an interesting plot, but is pretty uninteresting for long periods as the film moves towards its horrifying climax. Much of this disinterest stems from the below par video and sound quality, but it is primarily due to the "waiting around" for the climax that you know is coming from having read the box, and also having seen the 18 certificate on the packaging - but seen nothing to justify it for the first 95% of the film.

The extra features are pretty mundane and to be honest, I was glad as this was not a film that I liked enough to warrant spending too long wading through extra material.

Overall, this doesn`t have much to offer aside from the grizzly end, and is one to rent because the replay value is very limited.