Plot: The president of a video production company, a widower, decides to hold an audition to find his new bride, using the excuse of a possibly-to-be-made movie to survey the female field. However, once she’s off the casting couch, his actress is not so sweet.
Overview: Aoyama Shigeharu (Ishibashi Ryo) is a middle-aged president of a video production company, left alone with a teen-age son when his wife died seven years before. At his son’s prompting, he finally starts to think about remarrying, but the method he chooses for selecting his potential bride is unusual, to say the least. On the idea of his friend Yoshikawa (Kunimura Jun), he decides to hold an audition, using the excuse of a possibly-to-be-made movie to survey the female field.
Looking at the resumes, he actually comes across one, from a Yamasaki Asami (Shiina Eihi), that peaks his interest. The essay she wrote, relating the loss of her childhood dream (to study ballet) and the specter of death that she faced, shows a maturity the others do not. When it comes to the actual audition, Aoyama ends up ignoring most of the other women, and promptly calls Asami that night.
They seem to hit it off well, with Aoyama eventually deciding to propose to her on a trip to the seashore, but after they sleep together, with Asami asking him to love “only me,” she suddenly disappears. His subsequent search for her only turns up grisly mysteries of missing men and dismembered bodies.
It would be easy to turn Asami into some monstrous female man-eater, but the director, Miike, a veteran of many films about the marginal and displaced, is too concerned with those who don’t fit in society to allow that. Dialogue early in the film equating catching fish to catching women emphasizes the violence of the audition and establishes, even with the sympathy we feel for Aoyama, that he is not free of guilt.
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