Shigeharu Aoyama is a producer whose wife goes and dies on him. He loves her a lot and they had a son together and now it’s up to those two men to move on without her. Fast forward seven years. The son hasn’t had too much of a problem moving on, what with being a teen-age stud and picking up chicks on the subway to bring home and eat his daddy’s dinner. Aoyama though, has not remarried and doesn’t have a girlfriend. His son tells him that he’s looking old (having a dead wife and teen-age stud will do that to a man) and so Pops decides that maybe seven years is long enough for grieving (and celibacy).

But how to go about finding a new mate just as awesome (except for the whole dying young thing) as wife number one? Luckily he has a friend that is a bit of a schemer and operator. His buddy Yoshikawa decides that they’ll pretend to be casting a movie based on some documentary Aoyama had previously done and they’ll get thirty of Tokyo’s most attractive (and apparently gullible) actresses to come in and read for the part of Mrs. Aoyama. When Aoyama finds one he likes, he’ll cozy up to her, get her to go out, and eventually marry the lucky minx.

Aoyama takes home the pictures and cover letters of the applicants that he and his buddy are going to be screening the next day. Looking over them, he accidentally spills coffee on one and takes a look at it. Her name is Asami Yamazaki. She’s a pretty young thing with long black hair, but it’s what she writes in her cover letter that attracts Aoyama’s attention. She was a ballerina and was going to study in Paris until a waist injury forced her to retire from the biz and become psychotic. She talks about how her biggest hope had turned into her biggest disappointment and Aoyama decides that this is the kind of attitude that would make a perfect Wife #2.

The next day we go to the casting session and it’s pretty amusing. Aoyama and Yoshikawa sit at a desk and the hopefuls file in one at time and sit in a chair at the opposite end of the room from them. Yoshikawa fires a variety of questions at them on all sorts of topics ranging from their professional experience to their views on relationships and their sex lives. It’s a montage of freaks with people doing all sorts of things to catch the casting director’s attention. You’ve got people disrobing, doing baton twirling, showing off their scars from past suicide attempts, that sort of thing.

The day drags on and Aoyama hasn’t asked anyone anything. Then Asami comes in. She is dressed in all white, keeps her head bowed and could charitably be called “deferential” or uncharitably speaking, you could call her “mousy.” Once she shows up, Aoyama busts out with a fairly long monologue directed at her about pain and “maturity of vision” and all that. It’s obvious that he thinks he’s made some type of connection with her. He is also impressed that she was a ballerina because he wanted his new wife to have a “skill” and his old wife could play piano.

Later, after all this is done, he screws up his courage and makes The Call. You know the one. You plan out what you’re going to say and then as soon as you hear her voice, you should like you’re going through puberty again. I had a buddy once who made The Call early on a Sunday morning. I don’t think I’ve got to tell any of you that if there’s a worse time to make The Call, I don’t know when it is. Anyway, it turns out that this girl my buddy was going after was already dating a guy that looked like her dad, so he was DOA, but still if you’re calling on Sunday morning to set something up, you’re already dead in the water. Besides, if you want to hit on the chicks on a Sunday morning, that’s what churches are for.

So Aoyama gets ahold of Asami and they arrange a get together. She seems very interested in Aoyama and he is obviously interested in her. But there are some things that are a bit off kilter here. She had told him and his pal during the casting call that she was signed with some record producer, but when Yamazaki checked it out, this producer has disappeared! Aoyama asks her about that and she just says she lied about the producer to enhance her chances at getting the part.

He says he’ll call her again, but delays doing so at his friends suggestion. The movie now begins to turn it up several notches in the creepy department. You know how some people anxiously wait by the phone for their beau to call them? Well, Asami literally sits by the phone, her head bowed for days in the same position waiting for Aoyama to call. It’s almost like she was some type of robot that just went into standby mode until the call comes. The other creepy thing, and maybe I’m just overreacting, and it’s probably nothing, but near the phone is a large burlap sack that is tied up and it’s obvious that something is in it. Probably just her old ballerina gear, right? Some shoes and a tutu, most likely. Maybe some tights – that kind of stuff. Well, whatever it is, it’s nothing to get alarmed about, I’m sure.

Aoyama does finally call her again and they get together and eventually he decides to take a weekend trip to propose to her. They go to a hotel and it’s obvious that she wants to get busy with him (not too mousy now, are we?), so she takes her clothes off and asks that he look at her. It turns out that she was burned on the inner thighs. They get into bed, then he gets knocked out and the next time he wakes up, she is gone.

He then prowls the city looking for her based on some tidbits of information he gleaned from her cover letter and their conversations. He visits the old boarded up ballet studio where she used to train and runs into an old pervert in a wheelchair. We learn that he used to burn Asami when she was younger with hot sticks and that he was some type of freak who was into pain. We also see that he has artificial feet.

Then Aoyama goes off to visit the bar where she supposedly works. A person in the building tells him that it’s been closed for a year because the woman that ran it was murdered, her body cut into a bunch of pieces. It had something to do with a love triangle. She was married to a record producer. When they put the pieces back together again, there were some extra fingers, extra tongue and ear.

In a confusing yet informative sequence, we jump around time-wise to Asami’s past and her present. I’m not sure how much of this Aoyama is privy to, but we learn some of the awful origins of Asami and her predilections. We learn the terrible fate of the record producer and the secret of the burlap bag. These are the beginnings of some pretty brutal scenes that will end up leaving you feel like fairly queasy (there’s a feeding scene that really has to be seen to be believed). Anyone who is in it strictly to be grossed out will be rewarded for sitting through what most of us what call “character and plot development.”

Aoyama is home by himself, but someone has been in the house before him and has drugged his drink. Asami materializes and tells him that he’s been given a drug that immobilizes him, yet allows him to remain awake and feel pain. Many of you may recall this drug from the Harrison Ford movie What Lies Beneath. Apparently Indy Jones and Asami shop at the same pharmacy.

The deferential little girl has long since vanished and Asami moves purposely about like a someone who has done it all before. She’s brought a black bag full of goodies and is wearing gloves and an apron. She then proceeds to inflict some very heinous and very graphic torture on this guy who is awake throughout, but cannot move. I’m not sure what kind of drug there is that prevents you from losing consciousness, because he surely would have passed out long before a lot of this stuff happened to him. At least you’d hope he would.

Throughout this ordeal, he flashes back to previous conversations he had with Asami and more about her tormented life is revealed and you get a fuller understanding of why she turned into this monster. Eventually, Aoyama’s son returns home and the movie ends shortly thereafter. Some may say that it ended a little anticlimactically, but I think it actually keeps within the entire tone of the movie.

The horrible things in the last part of the movie are pretty stomach churning, but are made more so because of the context. Throughout this movie, things were quiet and understated. You could almost say that much of the movie was downright gentle. Therefore it is so much more jarring to see these things in the final scenes happen. They happen to a guy that we’ve spent over an hour and half with. A guy who isn’t just a cardboard man set up to be slaughtered, but a human being trying to find happiness. He has a son, a job, friends, even a co-worker that has a crush on him that he is oblivious to. It is so much more chilling to watch these things happen to him than to fifteen teenage campers you don’t even know the names of.

This is really the ultimate “blind date horror story” movie. It taps into the paradoxical problem you have when starting a new relationship. You have to allow yourself to be at your most vulnerable to someone you really don’t know. Oh sure, you’re not going to give them your ATM PIN on the first date, but eventually you spend enough time with someone and get comfortable with them and the next thing you know you’ve got needles sticking out of your eyes and your foot has been sawed off. At least I guess that’s what happens to you in Japan.

© 2008 MonsterHunter