Week 3

The Audition

The Japanese horror film Audition was an interesting watch. It is definitely a horror film, but not the kind filled with jump scares and scary looking monsters. Instead it is the kind with a psychological twist and disturbing imagery (both visually and mentally). The movie is about a widowed man looking for a new love life by running a phony audition for a supporting female role. The premise itself seems normal enough, but it takes a twist when the woman the widowed man chooses has a fishy background. The premise may seem misogynistic due to the premise of holding a fake audition to look for submissive traits of a woman but the twist of the movie leads me to believe its more feminist if anything. The main character may have come up with a sleazy method of meeting women, but after realizing the woman’s abusive past, everything that happened afterwards was the delusion of his guilty conscience. For me personally, the biggest shock was the fact he molested his own son’s girlfriend, even more than getting his foot cut off. The fake audition and the list of traits he was looking for in a woman was misogynistic in the sense that the objectification of women in the beginning of the film is so blatant, but the woman’s torture and mutilation was her form of revenge and fighting back. This along with the man’s guilty conscience gives the film a more feministic light.