Audition

Shigeharu Aoyama's wife Ryoko dies from an undisclosed illness. Seven years later, Shigeharu's teenage son Shigehiko encourages him to remarry. Shigeharu's friend, film producer Yasuhisa Yoshikawa, organizes a fake casting call, at which young women ostensibly audition for the starring role in a new television series. Posing as a casting director so he can meet the aspiring actress, Shigeharu is immediately enchanted by an applicant named Asami Yamazaki, a former ballerina who claims her dancing career ended due to injuries. Yasuhisa is suspicious when he cannot reach any of the references in Asami's résumé, including a music producer who went missing 18 months earlier, but Shigeharu continues to pursue her regardless. In her very small apartment, which contains little more than a large sack and a telephone, Asami sits perfectly still next to the phone for four days after the audition. When it finally rings, she answers, pretending she never expected Shigeharu to call. After several dates, she accompanies Shigeharu to a love hotel, where he intends to propose marriage. She reveals burn scars across her body and, before having sex, demands that he pledge his love to her. Deeply moved, he complies. The following morning, Shigeharu receives a call from the front desk to inform him that Asami has left. Shigeharu tries to find Asami, but all of the contacts on her résumé are dead ends, as Yasuhisa warned. At the dance studio where Asami trained, Shigeharu finds her former instructor, who tortured Asami by burning her legs when she was a child and now has prosthetic feet. Shigeharu then goes to the bar where Asami claims to have worked, where he learns from a local man that the bar has been closed for a year following the murder and dismemberment of the owner, and that the police found an extra tongue, an extra ear, and three extra fingers upon recovering the body. Asami sneaks into Shigeharu's house while he is at work and becomes jealous upon seeing a framed picture of Ryoko. She drugs his liquor and kills Gangu, the family dog. Shigeharu returns, drinks the liquor, collapses, and experiences flashbacks to previous dates with Asami and sexual experiences with other women from his past. In Asami's apartment, a man who is missing both feet, his tongue, an ear, and three fingers crawls out of the sack and begs for food. Asami vomits into a dog bowl, which the man hungrily consumes. Asami then uses a garrote wire to decapitate her dance instructor. Shigeharu passes out. Once he awakens, Asami informs him that she has injected him with a paralytic agent that disables his muscles but leaves him conscious and able to feel. As she begins to insert acupuncture needles into him, she explains that he has failed to love only her. She cuts off his left foot with a wire saw, and begins to do the same to his right foot until Shigehiko returns home from school; Asami attacks him. Shigeharu suddenly reawakens in the hotel, where he proposes marriage to Asami, who accepts. He falls back asleep and returns to reality to find Shigehiko fighting Asami. Shigehiko overpowers Asami and kicks her down the stairs, breaking her neck. Shigeharu instructs Shigehiko to call the police and stares across the room at the dying Asami, who repeats something she said on one of their dates about being excited to see him again.

Plot from Audition (1999 film)CC BY-SA 4.0