THE RED SHOES

Sun-jae, after catching her husband in bed with another woman, flees the house with her daughter and moves into a dilapidated apartment. One night, the woman finds a pair of red shoes on the subway and takes them. From that moment on, the life of Sun-jae and her daughter Tae-soo will be disrupted by a series of inexplicable events featuring the red shoes, which are said to be cursed. Killer videotapes, death-announcing phones, haunted websites... It seemed that Eastern imagination was focused solely on the ominous influences that technological objects can have on people's fate; but apparently, not only high-tech gadgets have the power to serve as a gateway between the world of the living and the world of the dead, even a simple pair of shoes can become an object of evil. Taking inspiration from Andersen's fairy tale "The Red Shoes," the Korean Kim Yong-gyun merely retells in a rather schematic way the now worn-out plot of an Asian-style ghost story; the structure is similar to any "The Ring," "The Call," or "The Eye": a woman as the protagonist, an event disrupts her life, a cursed object puts her in contact with the ghost of a girl with long raven hair, the countdown begins to free the girl's spirit before the protagonist's loved ones meet a bad end. Only the lack of originality of this film and its so evidently commercial intentions, aiming to exploit a successful subject to the fullest, could be enough to discourage "The Red Shoes," and if we add a series of factors that worsen its position, it is very difficult to find a meager lifeline for this ghost story. From a technical and artistic point of view, the film in question is very well crafted: Kim Yong-gyun's direction is very attentive to details; the actors seem quite comfortable and the photography is really very appreciable in its alternation between pastel colors and details of a much more intense color. However, it is not a singular formal attention that manages to bring a good horror movie to life, on the contrary, it is on horror, unease, and tension that the film fails to fulfill its job at all. "The Red Shoes" is a pretentious film, too focused on an artistic aesthetic presentation that forgets from the beginning to be primarily a horror: no minimally unsettling scene, no frightening appearance, no tension scene; just a few more splashes of blood than average, which certainly do not suffice to lift the viewer from a general drowsiness that will overtake them after ten minutes of viewing. In short, "The Red Shoes" fails in what the unoriginal Asian horrors know how to do best: give the viewer some effective scenes of terror. Not recommended even for j-horror addicts.