A schoolgirl sits on a bench in the subway, chatting on the phone with her friend who is late, much to her impatience. The schoolgirl hangs up and continues waiting, counting the seconds aloud when suddenly she notices a pair of pink high heeled shoes sitting by the edge of the platform. Her curiosity piqued, she walks over to them and tries them on, but then her friend appears and demands she hand the shoes over, saying she saw them first. A fight breaks out and the schoolgirl runs away, but she's followed by someone - something - who ensures she'll never need to wear shoes again...
First things first, this is not the classic ballet drama from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, although there are elements of that contained within. And the shoes aren't really red, as they're actually pink, but the mania associated with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale is featured here, only it's the wearer who never wants to remove the footwear rather than not being able to take them off. Apart from that, this film (Bunhongsin as it was known originally) is your basic East Asian horror seen in many incarnations.
The difference this time around is that director and co-writer Yong-gyun Kim (scripting with Ma Sang-Ryeol) has an apparent foot fetish, hence many shots of his female cast members slipping their tootsies into the shoes of the title. Do all women in South Korea have the same size of feet? It seems convenient that none of them have any trouble wearing the possessed shoes. Anyway, after an arresting introduction, the story settles into a domestic narrative of a concerned young mother, Sun-jae (Hye-su Kim) and her daughter Tae-Soo (Yeon-ah Park).
However, she is distracted when she spots a pair of pink shoes (uh-oh) on the subway and carries them home with her. These objects are supposedly the epitome of female covetousness, selfishness and jealousy and they do indeed bring out the worst in the ladies - during one scene, Sun-jae and Tae-soo are rolling around on the floor scrabbling for control of them. But is it the shoes that are possessed or is there an alternative explanation? Welll, yes, there is, and it's a letdown after all the finely crafted atmosphere on offer, verging on the silly. It's almost always a disappointment when horror films opt for this kind of twist, but viewers of The Red Shoes can find compensation in its great photography. Music by Byung-woo Lee.
[Tartan's Region 2 DVD has a director and cinematographer audio commentary, a making of featurette, a special effects featurette and a trailer as extras.]
