Audition follows a good-looking, nice guy TV producer and widower Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi, The Grudge) as he begins to search for a new wife.

When another producer friend suggests holding a casting call for a non-existent movie project, Aoyama is able to interview a wide variety of young women about their prospects for marriage, without them knowing his intentions. Unfortunately for him, Aoyama chooses an icily beautiful and submissive Asami (Eihi Shiina, in an iconic performance), a mysterious and elusive young woman whose references do not quite check out. The smitten Shigeharu persists despite the warning signs, but will he learn too late that Asami is not exactly marriage material?   

Alternately read by critics as a forebodingly misogynistic fairy tale and a searing indictment of Japanese patriarchy, Audition makes one thing perfectly clear: relationships based on mutual deception always start off on the wrong foot. The ultimate refutation of Japanese female submissiveness, and a grand statement on the way violence begets violence, Audition is a slow-burn horror film, which was responsible for creating a fresh new wave of Asian horror, showing how Shigeharu will soon realize that there is a far darker side to this attractive woman, in this nerve-shredding exploration of male fears and the stereotype of submissive Japanese women.