Name: CCFC Presents: AUDITION (1999) - Halloween Special!
Start: 2025-10-15T10:00:00+13:00
Location: 610 Dominion Road, Balmoral, Auckland, New Zealand 1041

CCFC Presents: AUDITION (1999) - Halloween Special!

It’s Halloween season, and this October Film Club is bringing you a bone-chilling masterpiece from Japanese master Takashi Miike, the iconic AUDITION!

Both revered and the source of great controversy for its daring, transgressive violence, Miike’s most iconic horror is one of the most enduring works of Asian cinema to emerge from the 1990s. Largely ignored in its home country of Japan, but widely considered Miike’s finest cinematic offering internationally, it is a mainstay on lists of the greatest horror films ever made. It has been cited as a major influence on horror films of the 2000s including the SAW series, THE DEVIL’S REJECTS and WOLF CREEK, though few of those films have the same level of formal control or thematic resonance that Miike’s film does.

For the first half of AUDITION, one would be hard-pressed to identify any horror elements at all — a subtle and methodical exploration of male loneliness in Japan, in which a widower (Ryo Ishibashi) enlists the help of a filmmaker friend to stage a fake audition in order to find a new girlfriend. The woman he eventually chooses, Asami (Eihi Shin), proves to be a lot more than meets the eye once her dark past begins to come to light.

Considered an important work of feminist horror, Miike’s film is a grisly and shocking horror of considerable depth and intensity, one that counts among its fans Quentin Tarantino, who listed it as one of the greatest films made since 1992, saying the film is ‘a true masterpiece if there ever was one’.

Said critic Kristen Yonsoo-Kim: 'A truly trickster move would be to take an unassuming date to Audition, which keeps up its façade as a potential romantic drama for an unusually long time (like, a feature film’s length worth of time). But it gives you the icky hints along the way, starting with the very audition in question, conducted by a widower pretending to cast an actress for his non-existent movie as a cover-up to find a new wife. He finds the perfect candidate—or so he thinks—in the beautiful, mysterious ex-ballerina Asami, but the extreme tonal shift about an hour in robs a man of his fantasy and replaces it with his worst nightmare. What’s worse than the sadistic atrocity you’ll see on the screen may be the sound—the cacophonous harmony of wire cutting through flesh and bone—and Asami’s playful “kiri kiri kiri” chant as she punctures her victim’s body. A tip: Get [dinner] super early. A warning: You may not get a follow-up date.'

Don’t miss your chance to catch this iconic work of horror cinema, just in time for Halloween. Wednesday 15 October, 8pm. Tickets just $13. See you there!