20th Anniversary Screening!

“Along with Psycho, Audition is one of the great gearshift movies, starting out as one thing and then transitioning on a dime into something else entirely.” — Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club

One of the most well-crafted, impactful, and infamous J-horror films ever made returns to the big screen after far too long a break. Audition was the turn-of-the-millennium flash point signaling the talent of Takashi Miike: a film artist twice as prolific as Fassbinder, a provocateur as multifaceted as Von Trier and a genre-bender as bent as David Lynch. Shocking arthouse audiences worldwide with its white-knuckle finale and ingeniously Sirkian slow-burn lead up, Audition blazed the trail for a fresh Asian horror wave across American screens for which we’re eternally grateful.

Recent widower Shigeharu is advised by his son to find a new wife. On the advice of a film company colleague, they stage “auditions” for a new girlfriend that masquerade as an acting job. Shigeharu becomes enchanted with Asami: a spooky twentysomething responsive to his charms. But this is no ordinary Fatal Attraction-style thriller, for it carefully pulls the audience through a wrenching exploration of deep male fears and the stereotype of submissive Japanese women.

Presented in 35mm, courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive