Red Shoes, a 2005 Korean horror movie written and directed by Kim Yong-kyun, and starring Kim Hye-soo. Contains many spoilers but no mercy.
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Kim Yong-kyun's Red Shoes (2005) is loosely based on a Hans Christian Anderson story of a girl so fixated with her red dancing shoes that she wears them everywhere, even her grandmother’s funeral. As punishment for her obsession, she finds herself unable to take them off—or to stop dancing—and eventually resorts to an amputation at the hands of a woodcutter to free herself.

In this movie, single mother Sun-jae (the lovely Kim Hye-soo) lives in silent unhappiness with her emotionally unavailable husband. After she walks in on him with another woman, she leaves with their daughter (Park Yeon-ah), who dreams of becoming a ballerina. As Sun-jae moves into an apartment surprisingly dingy for one in a high-rise (metaphor or set designer laziness?), tries to return to her old job as an eye doctor and rebuild their lives, she finds a pair of red shoes on the subway and can’t resist taking them home. She finds they cast the same spell on every other woman who glimpses them, including little Tae-soo, who insists that they help her dancing. Sun-jae is wracked with nightmares and hallucinations and glimpses of the shoes’ terrible history, dating to the rivalry of two dancers in the 1940s.

Well, I said LOOSELY based.

I have heard it said that the cinematography of Red Shoes is exceptionally beautiful, with haunting visuals, creative angles, and evocative lighting. Ask someone else about that, as my eyes were closed for most of it. I will say that the few scenes that I (regretfully) glimpsed before slamming my eyes shut have certainly been memorable. The horrific opening sequence, as one example, shows two girls coming across the red shoes on a subway platform. Within minutes, the friends are violently wrestling each other for the shoes, until one strides off with the dubious prize. Her victory lap down the subway platform ends with a surprise amputation and, campily, the shoes vacuuming up the flesh and blood. (Well, they’re evil shoes, but at least they clean up after themselves.) The scene closes on a shocking pan-out of the girl sprawled on the floor, screaming and staring at the bloodied stumps of her ankles. I suppose it's striking enough for those who like that kind of imagery.

As for the lighting--again, your mileage may vary. I could only think that these people were bats, or that the director confused 'darkness' with 'ambience'. Surely there are more creative ways to drive in the dreariness of a loveless marriage than making the couple eat in a pitch-dark kitchen? Shelving the sarcasm for a quick moment, though, I will grudgingly admit that the unrelenting darkness of the movie did make the appearance of red suitably unsettling. Red flickers maliciously in and out of the film on a jealous woman’s gown, a bitter little girl’s dress, and of course, the blood that flows in torrents in practically every other scene. And gore aside, even I could find an eerie beauty and grace in the glowing, warm-hued flashbacks to the 1940s, when Oki and Keiko rivalled each other as dancers and as women competing for the love of the stage manager--and a pair of red shoes. (I'm almost certain that the shoe envy stemmed from the fact that the besotted manager initially gave them to Oki as a gift, not because the shoes were Just That Gorgeous and the 1940s equivalent of Manolo Blahniks...but given Keiko and Oki's cardboard acting, only almost.) There is a pro-imperialist dance in one notable flashback, climaxing with the dancers falling to their knees before the imperial flag. The colonial setting in that tumultous time period draws a rough analogy of sorts to the shoe drama, though little is done with it.

It is also an interesting point that compared to the color and visual warmth of the flashbacks, present-day Seoul appears drab and empty. That is, Sun-jae is supposedly living in present day Seoul, but I often wondered if this was some futuristic vision of Seoul after a major mass exodus, or perhaps after some deadly epidemic wiped out nine-tenths of the population. (Or, I suppose, the killer shoes could have taken out most of the women and consequently destroyed the birth rate.) Essentially, I am forced to speculate on what could have happened to Seoul that the streets and subways of the largest and busiest city in one of the world’s most densely populated countries are always completely deserted. In the Seoul of Red Shoes, subway stations are where you go when you want to be completely alone. This is one way of underlining the alienation of Sun-jae, a withdrawn woman who loses what is left of her already faded identity when she ceases being a wife, but a very distracting one.

That might be the key word: distracting. The nightmarish visions of blood streaming from under a little girl’s dress, a child falling into literal fragments in her mother's arms, snowflakes melting not into water but blood—-all are shocking and memorable, but ultimately only cheap thrills. I wish Kim hadn't allowed them to distract from what could have been an artful portrayal of the conflicted position of women in a male-dominated world. Men run the dance companies, make or break the ballerinas, and fill most of the seats in the audience. Ballerinas exist only to be beautiful and please men's eyes. On the other hand, there are women like Sun-jae, who marry, bear and raise children, and are essentially invisible to their husbands, noticed only to be criticized for undercooking dinner. One throwaway moment at the beginning of the movie shows Sun-jae nearly struck by a car—the driver of which drives off without a word. In short, women are ornaments on stage and invisible off of it. In either condition, they are what men make of them, and their power strictly limited to how well they can please men.

The one guilty pleasure of the lonely Sun-jae is the buying and displaying (not wearing) of designer shoes. It is her husband’s young mistress who tries them on while Sun-jae is out running errands and taking her daughter to and from ballet class, a doll-like child that her husband likes to watch perform, but not parent.

The red shoes are the only fancy shoes we ever see Sun-jae wear, and their effects are visible. With a noticeably more confident posture and a newly direct gaze, Sun-jae realizes and embraces her desirability, and lets the shoes carry her to steamy scenes with the interior decorator designing the eye clinic she is opening (randomly, I can't say I see eye-to-eye with him--no pun intended--on how appropriate garish eye murals are for an eye clinic). It is to Kim Hye-soo's credit that we can see her physically transform from the rejected, mousy housewife we are initially supposed to see her as. (Here is where I point out that it would take a lot more than a heavy hairstyle and dark clothing to hide that woman’s stunning beauty. Also, allow me to ask why Kim Hye-soo has seen fit to lose those voluptuous Ishtar curves she had just a scant few years ago, and why no one stopped her.)

All of which, of course, prepares us at least a little for the darkest power of the shoes--driven in by the shock of seeing a mother and child fight over them like mortal enemies.

A less effective example of what the shoes represent is shown by Sun-jae’s obligatory Overweight Single Friend. In a chilling scene, Mi-hee visits as a loving aunt to Tae-soo, complete with the gift of an enormous (and slightly creepy) Victorian doll. Minutes later, she is physically wrestling the shoes away from her niece and marvelling, "I feel so young in these shoes..." This is a few moments before she is gutted before a mannequin in a wedding dress. (Oh, the subtle irony of this resonant point...zzz...) I’m told that Mi-hee's death scene was innovatively done. Well, ask someone who didn’t have their face buried in the couch cushions.

Sun-jae and her interior decorator (I should know his name, as he figures a lot more prominently in the movie than you can tell from this recap, but I found his character that boring) investigate to find why these shoes lead to bloodshed wherever they go. This is where Red Shoes fails dismally. Kim could have made some finer points about what the shoes meant to women, but the backstory is not nearly as compelling as the buildup might lead you to expect. Keiko and Oki are not portrayed well enough to make you truly care about their fate, and Keiko, especially, just spirals into over-the-top insanity. That deflates pretty much all of the psychological drama the first half of the movie was trying to portray. You learn the story of the shoes only to find that the movie is little more than a slasher flick.


=Major Spoilers Begin Here=
Here is what strained the most credibility on my part—-and in a movie about killer shoes, that’s saying something pretty substantial—-so, the stage manager watches Keiko butcher Oki and chop the feet off her bleeding corpse to get her shoes, laughing maniacally all the while. He then helps her bury the mangled, bloody remains of what used to be a beloved girlfriend. And instead of tearing madly for the first ship out of Asia as soon as Keiko’s back is turned and spending the rest of his life in a faraway country under an assumed name (I’d also have recommended investing in some heavy-duty facial-alteration surgery), he MARRIES her. For as we all know, it isn't love unless you've stabbed someone to death for it.

On top of everything, Keiko is wearing Oki's shoes at the wedding. To remind him of this tender moment in their great romance, I suppose. Even that doesn't give him cold feet. (I will say this movie at least lends itself quite well to bad punning.) I know that horror movie characters have to possess a certain degree of what one might kindly refer to as recklessness or meanly refer to as gaping stupidity, as these movies just wouldn’t have a plot if these people were capable of higher mental functions. That said, Keiko's guy just seemed one notch over brain-dead. He does not, like a sensible person, report her to the appropriate legal authorities, or have her committed to a high-security mental institution, or hire a string of trained assassins to rid the world of this bloodthirsty psychopath. I don't ask that he feel, you know, any lingering sorrow upon the violent passing of a girl he claimed he loved, let alone serious regret for having betrayed her for a murdering demon woman, or anything sentimental like that. But where were his self-preservation instincts as he smilingly waltzed down the aisle with a woman who makes Alex Forrest look positively adorable?

This sordid story, though garishly overdone, does provide a flimsy explanation of the bloodlust of the shoes, and there is a weak twist in the whos and whys of the haunting. There is an answer, if you will accept it, to Tae-soo and the interior decorator's repeated questions about Sun-jae's recent past, and her refusal to discuss it. There is also a non-surprise about what has really been going on, given that we have watched Sun-jae's sanity (or current identity, depending on how you interpret the hauntings) unravel so far that we put nothing past her by the end of the movie. And so there is a conclusion of sorts, with Keiko and Oki facing a ghostly showdown, and Sun-jae and Tae-soo being left to their respective fates. The viewer is left to decide whether mother or daughter is worse off.

And I am left to ponder this final question: What kind of ballet is done in high heels?