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aka - Odishon
Japan 1999
Directed by
Takashi Miike
115 minutes
Rated G

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
4 stars

Audition

Based on a novel by Ryu Murakami, Ôdishon opens innocuously enough looking for all the world like a soap opera-ish story about a widower, Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) who uses an audition, arranged for him by a movie-producer friend, as a means of finding a new wife. This part of the film is quite amusing, culminating in a montage of the differing applicants with their various idiosyncracies, present to the male gaze. However once the girl (Eihi Shiina) who has intrigued Shigeharu from her photo alone appears, the tone of the film begins to change. If you don’t have a stomach for horror, you might want to abandon the film at this point as the girl turns out not to be the innocent she appears to be and despite the warning signs the besotted would-be lover gets sucked further into a nightmare scenario.

Miike very cleverly hooks and reels you in with the initial banality of the story, a far cry from the stereotypical characters and stylistic tropes of the standard horror movie. Precisely because Shigeharu is such a well-developed character you want to stay with him even as things get progressively more horrific, Ditto too for the girl, Asami who hides a terrible secret behind her sweetly submissive façade. Behind the horror lies a genuine humanism that lifts this film well above the exploitational values that underpin much of the genre. Miike’s realization of the story also never falls into the conventional or predictable as he interweaves the psychological well-springs of the characters’ behaviour with the mechanics of story-telling.  

Ôdishon is not a pleasant film to watch but it is an impressive one.

 

 

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