The Red Shoes | DVD Review

Taking it’s namesake from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, The Red Shoes represents the sophomore effort of Korean director Kim Yong-gyun.

The original Anderson children’s tale is about a rags to riches little girl who commits the sin of pride when she becomes enamored of a pair of red shoes. As punishment, the shoes assume a life of their own and ultimately lead her to a tragic conclusion before she repents and is forgiven. Yong-gyun’s film adaptation completely discards the morality of the original tale and simply focuses on the equation red shoes=death.

To be blunt, the film is confusing – I’ve watched it twice and I still couldn’t tell you what’s going on. The film begins to fall apart as it attempts to create a whole lot of incomprehensible backstory to justify it’s skeletal plot. Actually, that’s not entirely true – apparently there’s an overabundance of plot, but it doesn’t really matter because it all comes back to one thing; red shoes=death. The film has a number of unfortunate drawbacks; scenes in which characters find themselves on a street or in the subway, places you would expect to find other human beings, only to find the world conveniently absent. I point this out because in order for the supernatural to be somewhat plausible and frightening, the ‘real world’ in which it operates needs to be just that – a real world. None of the film’s characters are in any way appealing – every female’s mind seems to revert to that of a petulant child whenever the red shoes are in the vicinity, and the males who are outside the pump’s psychological spell don’t seem to find anything strange about the implausible behavior of those who are.

The special features consist of a 17 minute ‘Making of…’, 14 minute ‘Visual Effects’ featurette and audio commentary track with the director, producer and female lead. The ‘Making of…’ is essentially the two leads and director talking about their roles and what it was like working with each other. The F/X featurette is unintentionally comic, complete with basement facilities, computer screen lighting and pimply technicians. The audio commentary is about what you’d expect and is (not unfavorably so) usually dominated by Kim Hye-soo, the film’s talkative female lead, who takes every opportunity to give an actor’s perspective on pretty much everything.

The visuals are drab, the character’s unpleasant and the plot unnecessarily (or depending on your viewpoint, necessarily) muddled. When all’s said and done, everything here adds up to a pretty tedious film-going experience.

Movie rating – 1.5

Disc Rating – 2.5