Reviews
‘Audition’ (1999): A First-Time Watch Review
Audition is one of the most notorious 1990s horror movies that I had yet to catch up with. While it might be shameful that it took me this long, my delay allowed me an opportunity. I can approach it with an advantage that English speakers lacked during the years it was building up cult status. Namely, I have read the 1997 Murakami Ryū novel it is based on, which wasn’t published in English until 2009.
For those not in the know, the slow-burn Japanese horror film follows lonely widower Aoyama Shigeharu (Ishibashi Ryô). Seven years after his wife’s death, he decides he should find a replacement. With the encouragement of a friend in the media industry, he holds an audition for a faux film. Among those vying to play a character modeled after Aoyama’s ideal wife is Yamazaki Asami (Shiina Eihi). Aoyama is instantly smitten with Asami, to the point of ignoring the many red flags and inconsistencies in her backstory. Long story short: This does not go well for him.
How Does Audition Compare to the Book?
First things first: Audition is better than the book. The texts share a similar structure, but director Miike Takashi imbues the cold and dry novel with more spirit. His visual and editorial sensibility is entirely beyond reproach and frequently downright gorgeous. Every element of the movie’s construction serves the story’s slow, inexorable slide into madness.
There is a certain off-kilter vibe throughout, partially thanks to a prime selection of unusual camera angles. Nevertheless, there is always a sense that things are getting worse and worse. The color scheme and cutting rhythm especially keep incrementally escalating until Audition hits its explosive finale. It’s an extraordinarily patient film, engrossing you with its plot and characters while slowly lowering you into boiling water. By the time things get extreme, it’s too late: you’re already locked in.
Some Narrative Elements in Audition Can Be Frustrating
While Audition is a gorgeous, impeccably mounted work, the one way it fails the novel is by lacking its straightforwardness. The book is hardly a great work of feminist literature, but the movie doesn’t evoke its themes quite as clearly.
Its ideas about how men and women treat one another are sometimes delivered with bracing clarity. I’m particularly partial to the way that the movie depicts the gaze. Almost never does Audition present a close-up image of what Aoyama and Asami are looking at. Instead, the camera focuses almost entirely on whoever is doing the looking, for a downright uncomfortable amount of time. This is an exhilarating visual way to explore the power dynamics between the two characters.
However, the movie muddles the story a little too much to present a coherent angle on what’s going on. It is possible (even probable) that I am being hopelessly Western by raising this issue. However, there’s a roughly 15-minute dream sequence that precedes Audition’s violent finale, and I found it to be film-breakingly flawed. The sequence, which is presented as Aoyama’s drugged-out hallucination, delivers too much load-bearing narrative content for its own good. It answers many mysteries about Asami’s backstory in a manner that’s too roundabout and unclear. Has Aoyama somehow psychically tapped into Asami’s point of view? Is his dreaming mind making this all up?
I can see why this lack of distinction can serve as a metaphor. Men objectify women, they see what they want to see, and so on. However, the finale lacks heft because our understanding of Asami lies almost entirely in the realm of imagination and possibility. Why not place a little more of that backstory into Aoyama’s real-life investigations of her past? This would allow her to remain mysterious while offering some helpful glimpses into her potential motives.
Instead, the whole thing ultimately feels kind of hollow and pointless to me. Plus, the dream sequence telegraphs a few great moments from the following 20 minutes, robbing them of their shock value. Also, it murders the pacing. This long stretch of tonal noodling comes precisely when you think the movie’s about to shoot into the stratosphere. I found it to be a real bummer, all around.
Is Audition Worth Watching?
Despite finding Audition’s legendary finale to be underwhelming, I’m still entirely glad that I finally watched it. It’s an almost entirely engrossing experience, presented with great skill by one of Japan’s most shockingly prolific filmmakers. Nearly every shot turns up something fresh and unexpected. And, to be fair, the finale is still pretty great. It should have been better served by the preceding scene, but it is still painfully brutal all these years later.
Plus, Shiina Eihi’s performance is perfectly calibrated. The movie straight-up doesn’t work without her. She knows that slow and steady’s the way to win this race, never going big when she can avoid it. With perfectly calibrated understatement, she seizes your attention every time she’s onscreen. She slowly and methodically draws the tension as tight as a razor-sharp wire saw.
All in all, it’s still pretty damn solid. I wouldn’t want one big quibble to get in the way of other Audition virgins checking it out. Consider this a big recommend.
A24 never stopped pumping out banger horror movies. Let’s get that out of the way, straight away. Even its commercial and critical flops, like Opus or Y2K, still took a lot of really original swings, even if it hasn’t been a string of masterpieces like in their horror heyday of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Still, they may have made their scariest yet with Undertone, in a return to A24’s original MO of pure indie filmmaking.
A Single Location Horror Film Powered by Sound
Undertone is not a perfect movie, with an occasional off story beat, and the ending just missing the mark of perfection, but it is a tried-and-true testament to the power of storytelling. With essentially one active, on-screen actress and a single location, the film manages to create a sensory hellscape with immersive nightmare-inducing audio that has both story and scares derived entirely from a podcast. It is a sensory overload of pure terror, one that feels deeply sinister in its pitch-black story, one that demands to be seen in the darkest possible movie theater.
A24’s Undertone: A True Crime Podcast Turns Supernatural
The story is pretty straightforward…at least at first. It follows a true crime/horror podcast host (Nina Kiry), who lives by herself as she takes care of her dying, elderly, and borderline vegetative mother. Her co-host (Adam DiMarco, who is never fully seen) is sent a series of ten mysterious audio files from an unknown address, presumably sent for her to listen to on the show. As they begin to record their latest episode with live reactions to the files, reality slips further as she and her co-host fall into supernatural delirium. Strange noises, slipping time, and other haunted house trimmings all come out to play, each elevated by (as mentioned) horrific sound design and an even more horrific backstory.
Nursery Rhyme Origins and Deeply Disturbing Mythology
The story is about 95% airtight. Without getting too deep into spoilers, the origins of these files and their meaning are deeply fascinating, with some elements and angles involving the origins of nursery rhymes that are very, genuinely disturbing. There is one twist in particular that explores what one of the sounds truly means, which is highly upsetting once pieced together.
That being said, Undertone has some familiar tropes, and while the movie mostly touches upon certain unexplored mythology, certain scenes can feel a little too familiar to other recent demon movies like Shelby Oaks. The true meanings are a lot more creative, but it could have played around with its mythos to create a truly original villain.
Undertone’s Ambiguous Ending Demands a Rewatch
Similarly, the ending is almost perfect. There is a final twist about something the protagonist might have done that is a little confusing, and reframes the context of the film. It is highly interesting, however, and opens up several cans of worms of what this movie has to say about children, motherhood, and parenthood as a whole, as well as posing questions about the movie’s setting and timeline. It is always better to remain vague in horror, which this movie definitely does, but just a slight retweak of its final act could give the audience just the tiniest more understanding, without it going into full, mainstream territory. The film definitely requires a second watch, and in the best way possible.
A Groundbreaking Podcast Horror Experience
In a nutshell, the film’s methods of storytelling are groundbreaking. This movie is not a podcast, but all of its scares and stories are delivered to us like it is one. It feels like the birth of a new medium or style of movie, a perfect blend of audio and visual, with emphasis on the audio.
Additionally, with the story being literally told to us as if we’re listening to the characters’ podcast itself, it is a nightmare rabbit hole.
Like many people born in the mid-90s, the Sci-Fi Channel was one of my first introductions to horror. Whether it was random films playing or Sci-Fi’s 31 Days of Halloween, this channel was one of the main channels in my household. For the month of March, we’re going to take a look at Sci-Fi Originals (and maybe I cheated a bit and picked films that had their premiere on Sci-Fi). Picking films for this month was no easy task. Did I want to cover one of the plethora of amalgamated mega-animals fighting each other? Or what about shark tornadoes? One of the films I picked, after finding it too difficult to find Children of the Corn (2009) on streaming services, was an odd alien film I had never even heard of. That film is Silent Warnings.
What is Silent Warnings About?
Layne Vossimer (A.J. Buckley), his girlfriend Macy (Callie De Fabry), and a group of their friends head to Layne’s cousin’s house, Joe (Stephen Baldwin), after his mysterious death. Once there, they find the house in disgusting disarray. The friends decide to help Layne clean it up in order to put it on the market. But things quickly go south when they find a series of VHS tapes Joe left behind in the attic. What’s revealed in those tapes shows something that’s out of this world. Can Layne, his friends, and Sheriff Bill Willingham (Billy Zane) fend off these otherworldly invaders before it’s too late?
Conspiracy Theories, Mental Health, and Paranoia in Silent Warnings
As stated, this film was a late pick as I could not find 2009’s Children of the Corn streaming anywhere. Boy, am I glad I picked this. Silent Warnings has its fair share of issues. But it makes up for them in so many ways. This film is a very sober look into conspiracy theories, mental health, and the lengths that people go to when it comes to perceived threats. We get very little Stephen Baldwin, but what we do get is more than enough. He’s a recluse who lives on his 40-ish-acre property that’s been alien-proofed. His best friend (cousin?) is a scarecrow that has an AK-47. And he constantly records incoherent ramblings with his camcorder. Baldwin absolutely kills in his limited screentime. It’s like Stanislavski said, there are no small parts, only small actors.
Small-Town Horror and UFO Lore in Porterville
The quaint town of Porterville acts as the perfect backdrop for a story like this: a sleepy, nowhere town, where most people know each other. A town where the big call of the day for the Sheriff is about a missing dog. It’s the perfect setup for a story like this. It even mirrors many of the towns mentioned in Silent Invasion: The Pennsylvania UFO-Bigfoot Casebook. Much of this film’s atmosphere, the crop circles, acres of corn, and the disintegrating house, create a condensed world that adds so much claustrophobia to the film’s soul.
Acting, Dialogue, and the Problem with Early 2000s CGI Aliens
That being said, there are quite a few issues. Mainly, the acting. Besides Kim Onasch, Michelle Borth, Billy Zane, and A.J. Buckley (mostly), much of this film’s acting feels very Sci-Fi Original. It doesn’t help that the film’s dialogue, from writers Bill Lundy, Christian McIntire, and Kevin Gendreau, is just plain boring. And that’s not even mentioning how awful the CGI aliens look. A 2003 film about aliens, when only two or three are shown on screen, should be fully practical. And the fact that they use digital aliens takes away much of the film’s punch.
Why Silent Warnings Is an Underrated Sci-Fi Original
Silent Warnings doesn’t break much ground when it comes to the topic of aliens/Ufology, but it’s damn entertaining. But that’s the thing. Films don’t necessarily need to break new ground. I appreciate the swings this film takes, whether they hit or miss. There’s a wonderful setup with Stephen Baldwin, and the slow build to an exciting finale makes it all worth the wait. For a Sci-Fi Original, Silent Warnings has worked its way into my heart.
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