Audition

Seven years after losing his wife to cancer, video producer Aoyama (Ryo Another Lonely Hitman Ishibashi) finds the new bride of his dreams at a casting call for a non-existent movie. Asami (Shiina) is modest, polite, sexy, a trained dancer - and, apparently, available. As Aoyama nervously begins dating her, the film slips into nightmare. Is his paranoia and guilt causing him to imagine the worst, or is Asami really a woman physically and mentally damaged by men since her childhood and out for revenge? Creatively reworked from a script by the son of director Shohei Imamura, this was a breakthrough film for Miike: his first to win festival prizes and overseas sales. It takes sex war tensions to an hallucinatory extreme and has a Grand Guignol climax that leaves many males crawling to the exits.