Audition

Audition (オーディション, 2000) — watch Takashi Miike's cult Japanese horror online on iFILM. Widower Shigeharu has raised his son alone for seven years. A friend in the film business suggests a shortcut to finding a new partner: stage a fake audition, interview women for a nonexistent role, and choose.

From the lineup, Shigeharu fixates on Asami — soft-spoken, almost absent. Eihi Shiina plays her with a stillness that makes the unease build slowly, invisibly. Something in her file doesn't add up. Calls go to places they shouldn't. A bag on the floor shifts. Miike spends the first two acts in melodrama mode, not a single horror beat in sight. Then the third act arrives.

Released in Japan in 1999 and screened at Rotterdam and Fantasia the following year, Audition became a landmark of the Japanese horror wave that influenced a generation of filmmakers worldwide. The final sequence remains one of the most discussed genre endings in modern cinema. Stream Audition (2000) on iFILM.