Audition

• The infamous 'kiri kiri kiri' chant Asami coos while sliding needles under Aoyama's eyes was improvised on set by Miike and Eihi Shiina, not scripted (Wikipedia 'Audition (1999 film)'; AsianMoviePulse).
• Eihi Shiina was a fashion model with exactly one prior film credit (Isao Yukisada's 1998 'Open House') when Miike cast her as Asami; nearly everyone else in the cast and crew were Miike regulars he'd already worked with (Wikipedia; Eihi Shiina Wikipedia entry).
• Ryu Murakami's source novel ends with the victim losing both feet; Miike split the difference and amputated only one with the wire saw on screen, and a producer reportedly told him to 'be a man and see it through to the end' rather than cut away at the torture (IMDb Trivia).
• At the 2000 Rotterdam International Film Festival the film triggered record walkouts and a woman who sat through the whole thing hissed 'You are sick!' at Miike during the Q&A, which delighted him; the same festival handed it the FIPRESCI Prize and the KNF Award (BFI; Arrow Films; Wikipedia).
• Eli Roth has said 'Hostel' was 'really heavily influenced by Audition and The Vanishing,' and he cast Miike himself in a cameo as a satisfied customer of the torture operation (Looper; Dread Central; Wikipedia).
• Miike shot the whole thing in roughly three weeks and built the first two-thirds as a deliberately slow, tender romance specifically to subvert it, later admitting he was 'having so much fun' filming the foot-cutting scene (Wikipedia; IMDb Trivia).

The back half is a dream and Asami may not be real. The film cuts to Aoyama 'waking' right after they first sleep together, then loops and reshuffles events. Read that way, the torture, the sack-man, the whole nightmare is his guilt-logic projection about replacing his dead wife and using a rigged audition to do it, which is why the timeline stops behaving and scenes replay out of order.

Asami isn't a monster so much as the bill coming due. The split-second flashback of her ballet teacher's abuse, the burns, the man with prosthetic feet, frames the climax as a survivor turning a lifetime of male grooming back on the men who built her to perform compliance. The 'audition' premise is the whole indictment: she's punishing the exact transaction the film opens with.

The man in the burlap sack, fed from a dog bowl, missing feet, tongue, fingers and an ear, is Asami's blueprint, not an aberration. He's what she does to men who get close, meaning Aoyama was never the first and the courtship we watched was a ritual she's run before. It reframes her shy stillness in the early scenes as a predator's patience rather than fragility.

A lonely widower lets his film-producer buddy talk him into a fake movie audition, a casting call rigged to interview a wife. He picks Asami: soft-spoken, doe-eyed, a former ballet dancer who barely makes a sound. Then Miike pulls the floor out. The courtship plays like a tender melodrama for an hour, lulling you stupid, before the picture folds inward into something that hunts. Needles. A wire saw. A burlap sack that moves. The slowest fuse in horror, and the loudest detonation. Kiri kiri kiri.