オーディション

Aoyama is a middle-aged Tokyo widower whose wife Ryoko died seven years earlier, leaving him to raise their teenage son Shigehiko alone. Shigehiko gently urges his father to find a new partner. Aoyama's friend Yoshikawa, a film producer, hits on an unethical but effective solution: they will hold a fake film audition for a fictitious project, screen the applicants, and Aoyama can quietly pick a future wife from the candidates.

Among the hundreds of applications, Aoyama is captivated by Asami Yamazaki — a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old in a white sweater who writes of giving up ballet after a hip injury and now seeking a new direction. The audition meeting confirms his fascination. Yoshikawa is uneasy: Asami's two listed references can't be verified — the bar where she claimed to work has closed, the record producer who supposedly mentored her has gone missing.

Aoyama begins quietly courting Asami, brushing aside Yoshikawa's warnings. They go on dinner dates and a weekend trip to a coastal inn where Aoyama sleeps with her; afterward he wakes to find Asami gone. The film cuts to Asami sitting motionless on the floor of her bare apartment, beside a telephone, beside a large burlap sack. The sack twitches. A mutilated voice rasps from inside it — Asami's former handler, the missing record producer, kept alive in the sack with no tongue, no feet, and no fingers, fed by her vomit.

The film begins to disorient. Aoyama searches for Asami when she disappears again; flashbacks intrude that may belong to her past — an abusive male figure from her childhood, ballet-school cruelty, a previous lover whose dismembered body once turned up in trash bags. Aoyama appears to slip into dreams that may be hallucinations, premonitions, or real; the timeline fragments.

In the climax, Asami drugs Aoyama at his home with a paralytic that leaves him conscious but unable to move. She kneels at his feet in a long leather apron, syringe in hand, and serenely chants 'kiri kiri kiri' as she pushes acupuncture needles slowly under his eyelids and into his abdomen. Then she saws off his left foot at the ankle with a length of piano wire. Shigehiko returns home, finds them, and tackles Asami. She tumbles down the stairs and breaks her neck. Aoyama, still half-paralyzed on the floor, is left alive, the film closing on his stunned, undecipherable expression as Asami lies dying nearby, smiling.