The Red Shoes (2005)

Very disappointing...

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

I've read people complaining about the shoes being pink (they're magenta/fuchsia to be precise) instead of red, I'm more concerned about the fact that those shoes aren't made for ballet, not even flamenco shoes have heels that high, they don't even look like a pair of shoes you could find in the 40s (but I might be wrong on this) and I wish this was the only problem about this movie! This movie is all about clichés, plot holes and bad written twists. It mixes the classic Red shoes tale with the basic revenge-themed ghost stories, but it does it wrong and makes no sense at all. This movie will only give you a headache for trying to find some kind of logic in this mediocrity award winning piece of @#?!. If you're looking for a well scripted movie this is not the case.

The title of this show is called THE RED SHOES mainly because of the blood around the shoes. This is my second favourite horror movie and was really scary. I had nightmares at night after I watched it. I personally find this show quite original. The two mothers thing showing the main character getting possessed on and off was terrifying. This show probably has one of the most terrifying opening scene. This show is very well paced. It shows the main character loving the shoes so much for the first 1/3 of the movie, for the next 2/3 of the movie everything just goes awfully wrong. Every time the main character tries to throw away the Red Shoes, they just come back. The subway scene around the ending of this film is probably one of the most terrifying scenes in cinematographic history for me. This film has its mystery elements and is really entertaining in various ways and keeps one at the edge of their seat. The flaws in this film is that this film gets really complicating towards the end and I did not understand the last scene which the young girl dance in front of the mirror. The ending requires really a lot of thinking. Other than that, this film is just awesome and is really frightening. I really enjoyed the mystery elements of this film. This film is very much like One Missed Call because the backstory about the ghost was only explained until the very end. Throughout the whole film, you do not know why weird stuff are all happening. This makes the weird and scary stuff much more frightening. Highly recriminated Score:10/10

The unrelenting power of Korean schlock horror, stunning photography, and a much revisited fairytale are the components of this colourful piece of work that goes that little bit further than the modern woman's obsession to spend a week's wages on nice footwear.There are a few flaws - the red shoes in question, for instance, are more fuchsia pink, there is a heavy reliance on far east stock-in-trades such as hags with hair hanging over their faces to look creepy, and I was unable to resist comparing the women fighting over said shoes to hobbits fighting over a Ring; but I'll leave all those Sméagol-becomes-Gollum analogies to Lord of the Rings addicts, and tell you that Red Shoes is an overlong but ingenious dose of blood and gore, with some beautiful dance scenes and vague psychological meditations on the nature of repressed greed, vengeful ghosts, and getting your legs chopped off at the ankles.The photography draws you in immediately. We enter a stark, brightly lit and virtual deserted subway station. The one thing that stands out are the bright 'red shoes', standing on a platform as if someone has stepped out of them onto a train. Two girls fight viciously over them. CGI's kick in nice and early with a trail of blood drawing itself up into the shoes. The second theme makes its appearance before the end of the opening titles as a ballerina goes through her beautiful and lyrical practice.Having set the tone, people start getting bumped off as the shoes start controlling events by controlling their wearer's desires. The have a strange magical power - the protagonist's daughter suddenly becomes a much better dancer after stealing them, but the shoes are inhabited by a curse that gets a bit nasty when someone takes them from the owner. Purists can concentrate to work out which scenes are hallucinations or dream sequences and which are not, while others just lean back and enjoy the bloodletting.We start with Sun-jae, who takes off from her wayward husband with her daughter Tae-soo. Sun-jae is an eye-doctor planning to own her own clinic, and soon strikes up a relationship with interior designer In-chul. She and her daughter fight over the shoes, which are then taken away by her friend who has an instant fancy for them. The friend has her eyeballs forked out for her trouble.The red shoes prove very hard to get rid of, even when they find the original owner. If you lose the plot half way through, you could do worse than simply enjoy the remarkable aesthetics - the wonderful glass shoe rack, the juxtaposition of horror and beauty, the wide-screen rendition which produces some effects unusual for a horror movie, the de-saturated backgrounds, the unusual framing that sticks in the memory - the sudden overhead shot of the table when Sun-jae is having dinner with the designer, or the beautiful shot of Sun-jae and Tae-soo bathing, like something from a classical painting.The dance digressions and occasional humour are sadly all too infrequent. "Fight quietly will you!? - the neighbours will call the police!" Or, replying to the mundane casual question, "What brand are they?" "Subway!" Instead, the constant scariness is eventually wearing. A change of pace, for instance, by developing the love-theme between Sun-jae and the designer, would have been most welcome.Towards the end I just wanted them to hurry up and wind up dead, although I liked the shoes falling through snowflakes and (in another scene) snowflakes made of blood. A theme that could have usefully been developed further is the idea of being "in the flow" as opposed to driven out of control by temptation and desire. The interior designer is one of the few people not affected by the shoes. He will only work when he "gets the vibe" and provides an almost protective force for Sun-jae. Yet attributing too much depth of meaning to what is basically a commercial horror-flick (the end-credits are interrupted to lay a foundation for Red Shoes II) is giving it too much credit: but if the current offering is too wacky for all except hard-core horror fans, the consummate artwork speaks of great potential and talent.

I'm in a quandary over this film. Like many other reviewers have amply illustrated here, this film is like a Korean Klone in lots of ways. It borrows moves from the Ringu play-book, the Dark Water play-book, the Ju-On play-book, The Eye play-book...please stop me. It's got a daughter and mother all alone in the world facing supernatural evil. It's got hunched-over, black-haired teens with bad attitudes and osteoporosis floating around upside-down and showing up in elevators. It's got the cheating hubby, the young love interest, the entrepreneurial "young Asian professional female" slowly losing her mind. Most importantly, it's got the requisite cursed artifact (not a wig, not a videotape, not a pair of transplanted corneas, but a swanky set of pink stilettos that a particular ghost doesn't want any mortal wearing).BUT GOSH DARN IT, I LIKED THIS FILM! I guess it says something if I feel compelled to excuse myself for this fact, but I really did care for the characters and the serious situation they are hopelessly trapped in. Indeed, I was hooked by the grue--people getting their feet forcibly removed gets my attention. The cinematography is colorful, and artful, and top notch--as we have come to expect from Korean directors. (Did you catch those cool on-purpose-out-of-focus shots? Fuzzy weirdness...) The music is actually pretty unique--the low-key guitar ditty that recurs off and on is melodic, and personal, and not overwrought. Yes, the plot "twists and turns" in terribly predictable ways: Could our protagonist really be the guilty one? Is it possible that we might find the answer to the horrible mystery by rifling through old newspaper copy in the library? Even though we've "properly buried" the red shoes with their owner, is it possible the evil will return nevertheless to wreak ultimate revenge? When we get to the end, will the decidedly downbeat narrative actually make very little sense? Yes, you've seen--and come to expect--it all.But, darn it, this flick is done with such panache in a very gutsy way. The characters are carefully drawn, the direction is solid. And when you get right down to it, America simply does not make films like this. I don't think America ever will again. We used to make great, sad, horror films, but not anymore. We real horror fans have got to rely on films like "Bunhongsin" to get our fix. In fact, that's precisely why I give this film the benefit of the doubt.