Nathan For You‘s ‘The Hunk’ meets Stephen King’s Misery in this J-horror classic about a widower (Ryo Ishibashi) who holds a fake audition to find a new wife.

Released in 1999, Takashi Miike’s international breakthrough remains among the best of his 100+ films. A far cry from the usual bunny boilerplate, it has a unique story and a narrative technique that wrong-foots you from the off. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the first half is screwball comedy before descending into screwed-up territory; a sick joke about a battle of the sexes.

And though the reveal goes harder than Hitch could have imagined, Miike plants seeds along the way of which the master would proud. The hint of a workplace affair from him; a falsified reference from her. And not an inkling of horror until the halfway point, when the movie takes a hard left turn into J-horror so frightening it makes Ringu look like Pingu.

Audition abandons the safety of linear narrative for a labyrinthine nightmare, throwing us headfirst down Lynchian corridors of the mind. The ensuing psychological and physical freak show doesn’t so much expose the sexism of Japanese society as flay it alive. But the film also hits deeper (and deeper) in a post-Me Too Western world, dissecting systemic abuse in the creative industries; a man using power and deception to prey on vulnerable women.

More broadly it is a movie about patriarchy, with (spoilers ahead) one of the all-time great genre villains in Asami (Eihi Shiina). Despite her predilection for methods of torture that would make Jigsaw back away slowly, we sympathise with Asami all the way through because of her survivor’s strength and twisted innocence. When she tells Shigeharu she will never lie to him, she means it; and when she says, “You’re all the same,” we feel it.

Strangely elegant and dizzily indelible, this is a film that once seen is burned into you forever. Tough as piano wire and blue as velvet, it reassures us that love hurts.