Writers for "Variety", "The Hollywood Reporter" and "Sight & Sound" all emphasized the film's final scene. Scheck ("The Hollywood Reporter") wrote that "Miike lulls the audience into a state of complacency with a studied, slow-moving, lightly comic first half before delivering a gruesome final section that makes Stephen King's "Misery" look wholesome"; the ending was "all the more shocking for the clinical way in which it is presented". Eisner ("Variety") stated that it is only at the ending of the film that "Audition" "breaks out of creepfest ghetto". In his essay on themes in "Audition", Robin Wood stated that most of Miike's films are disturbing for "what they have to tell us about the state of contemporary civilization; they are not in the least disturbing in themselves, operating on some fantasy level of annihilation, with 'comic-book' violence". In comparison, he stated that "Audition" is "authentically disturbing, and infinitely more horrifying: the first time I watched it – on DVD, at home, after warnings I had received – I was repeatedly tempted, through the last half hour, to turn it off". Wood compared the film to Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom", stating that the film was "almost as unwatchable as the news reels – of Auschwitz, of the innocent victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Vietnam, victims of Nazi or American dehumanization".