Let’s be honest, folks.
Desire isn’t simple, whether it’s in everyday life or on film. You could say it’s messy, but nah… scratch that. Desire is complicated as fuck. It sneaks up on you, warps your thinking, and sometimes leaves you horrified and completely unhinged. It can turn your whole world upside down, and if you’re not careful, it can destroy you physically, mentally, or both.
Takashi Miike’s Audition and David Lynch’s Inland Empire, part of my curation last week, explore obsession in radically different forms, one is grounded in psychological cruelty, the other dissolving into fractured identity and yet both expose how fixation erodes reality
Before we get into specific scenes, it helps to understand what these films are actually doing and why they’re obsessed with obsession and not just in some surface “she wants him, he wants her” way. Both films are about distortion: distortion of desire, identity, memory, projection, and reality itself. But they speak totally different cinematic languages.
Audition starts with a lonely widower who holds an audition to find a partner, and he’s drawn to Asami, a seemingly sweet woman. What begins as a slow-burn romance turns into something brutal and unforgettable, with Miike showing obsession as projection, expectation, and the physical consequences of desire gone wrong. He’s said that horror isn’t supernatural but real people, real choices, real terror. And yes, he calls it a “love story.” That’s the punchline.
Miike has said he never set out to make a traditional horror film, and that when he read the novel he was scared because it felt real. He said that he filmed humans, and horror emerged naturally. Perhaps this is the key to how Audition treats desire: it’s not about fantasy but about what happens when we project fantasies onto other people and what happens when those projections go horribly wrong. Aoyama’s desire comes from grief and loneliness, and he fills every silence with expectation. Then Miike takes that expectation and twists it into something utterly fucking ghastly. Critics have argued Audition is a critique of the male gaze, objectification, and social repression, where women are reduced to criteria on a checklist. The moment that power dynamic collapses, everything explodes. The torture and mutilation aren’t just shock for shock value; they’re the physical manifestation of projection, repression, and unresolved desire.
Even in the early scenes, you can feel the tension simmering. Obsession isn’t just Aoyama staring at a woman, it’s how he uses the world around him to feed it. The tape screening? He’s alone, rewinding and pausing Asami’s auditions, hanging on the smallest twitch or laugh. That’s obsession: turning someone into a puzzle in your head and endlessly trying to solve it. His nervous fidgeting, the way he overinterprets her pauses, every tiny gesture becomes a feedback loop. He’s not interacting with a person, he’s interacting with his projection of her. Every glance, every small movement from Asami, every pause in conversation is loaded. When she comes over for dinner, it seems normal on the surface but every word is weighted with expectation.
It’s kinda cute at first but Miike’s lens already signals danger. And then the horror detonates. The wire scene hits like a bloody punch to the gut, but it’s not about cheap scares; the terror is deliberately intimate. Desire becomes punishment, and punishment becomes art. Obsession doesn’t vanish with gore; it transforms into something dark.
A great qestion to ask ourselves here is…
How often do we project qualities we want onto someone else rather than seeing them as they are?
And what happens when those projections hit reality and reality doesn’t play nice?
Food for thought eh?
Now flip over to Inland Empire, and sweet Lucifer, the language couldn’t be more different. Lynch refuses to explain it in interviews. When asked, he basically says it’s “about a woman in trouble” and viewers are free to interpret it however they like and that explaining it would ruin the film.
At its core: Nikki Grace, a Hollywood actress, lands a role in a cursed film, and her reality starts to fracture and bleed into the film she’s making. But describing it like that is like calling a black hole “a big space thing with gravity.” It’s naming components, not giving the experience. Unlike Audition, where the narrative is linear until its not, Inland Empire never behaves conventionally. It folds reality, fantasy, dreams, nightmares, films within films, anthropomorphic rabbits, weird Polish landscapes, and multiple timelines into itself.
Lynch improvised and stitched scenes together. Desire here is internal and existential. It’s the obsession with performance, with roles, with “what am I doing and who am I” that eats away at her sense of self. The rabbits, the black rooms, the phone call, they aren’t literal threats, but they externalise mental fixation. Obsession becomes a hallucination that dominates perception rather than action.
This is the very obsession that becomes a maze Nikki can’t escape. Watching this is like tripping over your own brain while it redecorates your living room. It’s fucking painful, confusing, and mesmerizing all at once.
Here we can ask ourselves….
When desire spirals internally, does it amplify who we are, or dissolve us entirely?
Watch them back-to-back and it hits you: obsession isn’t tidy, it isn’t obvious, and it doesn’t announce itself with a neon sign. In Audition, desire is tangible, brutal, and with consequences. In Inland Empire, it curls inward, destabilising identity and looping through your head until you’re not sure what’s real. In both, the small gestures carry the weight of obsession and danger.
Audition is like getting smacked upside the head with a cricket bat when you least expect it.
Inland Empire is like dozing off in class and waking up inside someone else’s nightmare.
By the end, you’re no longer sure whether you’ve watched a story, wandered through a dream, or stared straight into a warped reflection of yourself.
Probably all three.
And somehow… you’re fine with that. Aren’t you sunshine?
So with all of that in mind, let’s dig into some of the moments that really show how these films handle desire and obsession, beyond the obvious finales. In Audition, there’s a scene that rarely gets talked about but is pure nightmare fuel….when Asami’s apartment is first shown in full detail.
It’s not scary because of what she does, but because of what the space suggests.
Every corner is immaculately clean, every object perfectly placed, and the silence between movements is deafening. You start noticing the small things: the way a cushion is slightly askew, the subtle creak of a floorboard, the way shadows cling to walls.
It’s domesticity weaponised, and it forces you to feel that Aoyama’s fantasy is already teetering on a cliff. Then there’s the scene where she brings out the fake cast on her leg. It’s so innocuous and yet watching Aoyama fumble with it, trying to hide his nervous fascination, it becomes erotic, awkward, and horrifying all at once.
That’s Miike: he weaponises the ordinary.
You know something’s about to go terribly wrong, you just don’t know when.
Later, the staircase scenes aren’t just “final act gore.” The slow tension as Asami ascends or descends is hypnotic. The camera lingers on her legs, her hands, the way she tilts her head, and it’s almost clinical in its precision. You’re not watching horror happen; you’re watching inevitability being measured. The terror comes from understanding the rules of the space before anyone else does.
Inland Empire is a whole different kettle of fish. There’s a scene where Nikki sits in a hotel room watching herself on a TV that shouldn’t exist. It’s a split-second moment, easily missed, but it’s the film folding onto itself and identity doubling, reality warping. And then there’s the Polish sequences with the creepy neighbours: people saying things in Polish you don’t understand, gestures that don’t match words, tiny shifts in posture that make you doubt whether you’re even in the same world. And the rabbits. The rabbits are ridiculous and horrifying at the same time somehow feel like they’re judging every choice Nikki makes.
Surreal? Absolutely.
Terrifying? Yeah, the kind that messes with your head.
Then there’s the phone calls that overlap, that don’t make sense, and the voices that barely feel real. They’re tests, traps, obsession in her ear while you are watching. At the parties, the dialogue loops and shifts. Reality warps, and you’re never sure whose desire you’re even looking at.
Hers, theirs, yours?
And that’s exactly the point.
Across both films, the difference is obvious. Audition measures obsession in the body, space, and consequences. Inland Empire traps it in perception, looping it through identity.
Obsession doesn’t announce itself. It sneaks in, mutates, sticks.
And by the time you notice… it’s already too late.
Until next time, Night Walkers
~S
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