Description
When a schoolgirl, waiting on a subway platform, finds a fascinating pair of red shoes sitting nearby, she hasn’t hardly slipped them on before another schoolgirl ambushes her and steals them. That’s the first thing you need to know about this particular pair of high heels—they provoke violently irrational jealousy. The second thing becomes clear moments later, when the shoes perform a bloody double amputation on the thief. There’s more still to the shoes, things that slowly and frighteningly become clear when they’re found by the miserable Sun-jae, whose bitterly unhappy marriage falling apart and ballet-dancing daughter Tae-soo is playing favourites with daddy. Moving into a small, dirty apartment with Tae-soo and struggling to get her own eye clinic off the ground (she’s not sure that her fast-talking but undeniably handsome interior designer is that much help), Sun-jae finds that the red shoes bring a tiny touch of joy into her grim life. But not for long. As Sun-jae is dragged deeper into the mystery of the shoes, tensions mount, eerie events occur and blood a far deeper shade of red begins to flow…

DVD Available

Haunted cel phones, haunted videotapes—by the time the haunted newspaper in Japan’s Premonition had fluttered away, it seemed that the Asian horror wave was just about out of ordinary objects to infuse with supernatural evil. One would think that high-heeled horrors that The Red Shoes’s title refers to should be tossed back in the closet, but hold on. Inspired to a degree by the famous Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, director Kim Yong-gyun has taken great care to elevate The Red Shoes above the self-parodying morass of the obvious and the predictable into which most post-Ringu spook-outs now fall. The film is less about the shoes themselves than it is about the monstrosities that envy, bitterness and scorn can generate, and about one woman teetering at the edge of madness (actress Kim Hye-su captures Sun-jae’s fractured character perfectly). Which isn’t to say that the expertly shot and cleverly edited The Red Shoes doesn’t offer any number of the chilling, even outright shocking images that fans of Asian horror have come to crave, and the ingenious musical score by Lee Byung-woo only cranks the fear factor higher!

—Rupert Bottenberg

Credits
Director: Kim Yong-gyun
Screenplay: Ma Sang-ryeol, Kim Yong-gyun
Cast: Kim Hye-soo, Kim Seong-soo, Park Yeon-ah, Ko Su-hee, Lee Eol, Seo Ha-rim, Son Se-gwang
Producers: Shin Chang-kil, Creta D. Kim
Distributor: Tartan