Audition · reception & legacy
2000 · Takashi Miike
How Audition has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It hit the 2000 festival circuit as a scandal — famous for walkouts and faintings at Rotterdam — and has since been fully canonised, now a fixture near the top of best-horror-of-all-time lists and the film that made Miike's name in the West.
What's debated
The evergreen fight: is it a feminist revenge text or misogyny dressed up as one — and is the infamous bait-and-switch structure genius patience or ninety minutes of stalling?
Its footprint
'Kiri kiri kiri' ('deeper, deeper') is one of horror's most quoted lines, and the film became shorthand for extreme Japanese cinema — routinely cited by Western horror directors like Eli Roth as a formative shock, and a go-to 'don't spoil the turn' recommendation.
Where it stands
A cornerstone of the 'you must go in blind' canon — a Letterboxd horror-list perennial and the standard entry point into Miike's enormous filmography.