Bloody Perfect: How Deep is Your Love?
Isaura Barbé-Brown brings us the next post in her new monthly column, Bloody Perfect.
Note: this column contains spoilers for Audition
If when you read “kiri, kiri, kiri, kiri”, you automatically hear it being said in Asami’s (Eihi Shiina) sweet sing-song voice, then congratulations, you too have been permanently scarred by Audition (1999). Your prize is a slightly haunted look whenever a scene randomly pops into your head.
The film follows Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a widower and single father whose joie de vivre fades with the seasons after his wife’s passing. Taking a suggestion from his son, Aoyama decides the best thing to do is get remarried. However, rather than going on dates like a regular person, Aoyama and his film exec friend, Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), come up with a plan: they’ll audition women for a leading role in a film that will never be made, in order to find Aoyama a suitable wife. A totally fine and normal thing to do I think you’ll agree. Before auditions even begin, Aoyama is transfixed by the file of one particular girl, Asami Yamazaki, a shy and delicate ex-ballerina. During their meeting, he falls even further in love with her and, ignoring Yoshikawa’s misgivings about Asami and her past, Aoyama plows ahead in pursuit. What Aoyama doesn’t know is that Asami is not nearly as coy as she seems and, wherever she goes, she leaves death in her wake.
This film sneaks up on you. It starts out so quiet and unassuming that the horror, when it happens, really takes your breath away. The whole second half of this movie haunts me. Whilst re watching, I couldn’t even stomach the scene where Asami keeps a mutilated man in a sack, fed by her fresh, hot vomit. Even the sound of it activates my gag reflex. Shit, even typing it does. But the scene I remember in all its glorious detail, whether I watch it or not, comes right near the end.
After disappearing for weeks, Asami sneaks into Aoyama’s house, murders his dog, drugs his whiskey, and waits for him to return. After drinking the whiskey and passing out, he wakes, paralysed but still able to feel everything, and finds Asami donning a leather apron and gloves (which look amazing, FYI), and preparing her tools, which include a stack of large, sharp, metal needles. One by one, she takes each needle, slowly sticks it into Aoyama’s chest as she repeats to herself “kiri, kiri, kiri” - deeper, deeper, deeper. As if this isn’t enough, she then drags herself over the needles sticking out of Aoyama’s body, pushing them deeper still. She moves onto his eyes for more of the same, flicking each needle she’s placed with grim satisfaction, inflicting more pain, admiring her work. Once she’s done with all the needle play, she moves onto Aoyama’s feet, gleefully sawing one off at the ankle and tossing it aside with wild abandon.
As an actress, I can’t say I completely blame Asami. I probably wouldn’t slice a foot off or anything, but if a producer invited me to an audition as a ruse to find a new wife, I would be pretty pissed off. As a survivor of abuse, Asami has found her own unique way to take back control from those who do her wrong. Unlike the nervous and unsure Asami we first meet, Leather Apron Asami is calm, confident, and super enthusiastic about the task at hand. There is something transfixing about a female villain who is unashamed of her depravity, and I think that’s why Asami and her slow, methodical torture has lodged itself in my brain, and over the years, it has only burrowed deeper, deeper, deeper.
Isaura Barbé-Brown is a Hackney born and based actress. She studied at AADA in New York and BADA in Oxford. She has written for The BFI, Black Ballad UK as well as The Final Girls/Bloody Women and been a guest on The Final Girls podcast and the Evolution of Horror podcast. She has done talks at the BFI for their Squad Goals event and during their Love season with the Bechdel Test Fest on race in romantic films. Isaura has also been on panels for BFI Future Film, The Watersprite Film Festival and The Norwich Film Festival. Her acting work covers theatre, film, tv and voiceover. She has also written for short film, TV and theatre as well as short stories and poetry. You can find Isaura on Twitter and Instagram.
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