The trailer to this Korean movie looked promising and honestly when the movie started I was thrilled. Two girls fight over a pair of shoes in a subway where they found the abandoned shoes. One gets left behind, the other walks through endless corridors wearing her new shoes with pride but you know something is wrong when she hears footsteps around her. Cinematography is awesome with washed out colors, blurry areas making you focus on certain elements and the pink shoes over-saturated and shining. Awesome... when the girl wakes up to find the shoes and feet gone screaming in a puddle of blood I thought this will be a good one for sure. But it wasn't. "The red shoes" is a totally incoherent mess of story telling, mixing several ideas of Asian ghost movies like dark-haired girls, bloody eyes, creepy elevator rides and endless creepy corridors in for the horror audience. Otherwise the movie is slow, way too long and mixing loads of element in a fashion that to me made absolutely no sense in the end. Basically the movie continues with a woman and her daughter Tae-Soo (I will never forget that name because her mother screams and cries her name like a million times throughout this movie which gets really annoying after a while) who separate from their father who has an affair. They move into a new apartment to live on their own, the woman finds the pink shoes on a subway ride and things start to get strange including many flashbacks melting the plot together with the opening. From here on its all about her and her daughter, both beginning to be obsessed with the shoes, an architect who builds her new bureau and gets into her life and the resulting love story. People die, flashbacks show to a back story about a murder involving the shoes and vengeful ghosts. There are both creepy and beautiful moments, especially on the visual side but the mix of flashbacks gets pretty torn up and in the end you think they didn't want to end the movie because you get like three ends piled upon another. The movie is pretty hard to understand and I think its because the script is a mess.. many things happen without explanation (the birds, the blood dripping from sky and ceiling several times, the idiotic newspaper ad and internet story...). If the story was that complex and psychological they sure wouldn't end the movie with pink shoes standing somewhere and another woman reaching to take them. I would have expected such ending in any stupid slashed movie but not in this one. "The red shoes" is loosely based on the Andersen story mixing in some typical Asian ghost elements, love story and psychological elements. To me it totally fails except for some nice scares. A real big let down after such a strong beginning and another proof that sometimes less is way more.
Review of The Red Shoes
