What the hell was that!! [And, I haven't yet completed watching the movie]

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Ok, I am done. Now, what the hell was that!?

Takashi Miike's Audition is less a horror film than it is a romance thriller, and it surprised me by staying in the mode for a good hour. A man in the movie business uses the audition process to meet a marriable girl, they hit it off, etc., but he gets a lot more than he bargained for. Or does he? While the film can be appreciated as straight-up horror - the girl turns out to be a demented torturer - the second hour's sheer phantasmagoria makes the story ambiguous no matter how straight-forward the filmmakers seem to think the story is. Is it all in the protagonist's mind? There's a case to be made, and the "nightmare" could be attributed to his own feelings of shame (meeting someone under false pretenses, her being so much younger, what his wife would have thought) and fear (he doesn't really know who this girl is, and any new relationship has its anxieties). But while a lot of imagery IS expressionistic, there are also some irreconcilable "objective" moments. Due to the symbolic nature of the man's anxieties, I'm going to go with no solution at all, but rather proclaim that both realities are true, simultaneously, à la Mulholland Dr. A very interesting film, complex and surprising. Heck, to me, the horror scenes were actually the least interesting thing about the movie.

Well for anyone who thought "so what?" about the whole film, read this...

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it all makes perfect sense, the film is NOT a horror movie at all, it is the blurred perception of the main character of what he wants his next wife to be like, each version of her is a different angle that he perceives her from