Audition/YMMV

• Adaptation Displacement: Based on a novel by Ryū Murakami, though the book wasn't translated into English until 2009, ten years after the film was released.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Does Asami's freakout make her more Yandere or Cute Psycho? Or is she only "loving" Aoyama the way she was taught as a child?
• Complete Monster: Asami's usual reaction to finding out her love interests can't / won't love exclusively her (like if they happen to have family or other friends) is to kill all their family and friends and mutilate them to make them totally dependent on her.
  • Another example is Asami's entire family, specifically her stepfather. Every single one of them abused her in ways too brutal to be shown. Shoving a little girl down the stairs? Forcing them into a cold bath until they catch pneumonia? Burning them in their upper thigh right by her vagina? What Asami does is horrible, but it doesn't change the fact that she was relatively tame next to her stepfather.
• Grotesque Cute: The scene with the bagman and the vomit.
• It Gets Better: People coming into this film expecting the wall-to-wall gorefest typical of a Miike film will be initially surprised and disappointed that it starts off as a romantic comedy. Stick around, boys and girls... Uncle Takashi isn't done with you yet.
  • However, the ending actually implies that It Gets Better...I think...
• It Was His Sled: It's pretty much common knowledge that the movie isn't a romantic drama in the slightest.
• Moral Event Horizon: Asami wants her boyfriend to love only her. Too bad he has an adult son and a dog. Well, easily fixed...
  • Additionally, her stepfather crosses the Moral Event Horizon the moment he pops up!
• Nausea Fuel: The only time it is okay to feed someone your own vomit is if you are a bird feeding your babies. Made about a million times worse when you realize that, according to the director, this was not a special effect. It was actually Eihi Shiina's own vomit, at her insistence.
• The Woobie: Subverted and possibly deconstructed. When you still think it's a romantic comedy and she's showing Aoyama her scars and telling him about the abuse she suffered, one might be expecting a love conquers all ending where he mends her tattered soul and they live happily ever after. Then things go horribly, horribly wrong.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Possibly Asami.