Some girls will do anything for that pair of Jimmy Choo’s – but perhaps this is going to far?…

(Warning: this review contains spoilers!)

Sun-jae’s(Kim Hye-su, Three) shoe obsessed world is falling down around her ears. When she finds her intimidating husband in bed with another, she moves into a new apartment with her daughter Tae-soo (Park Yeon-ah) to make a new life for herself, intending to return to work and to set up her own business.

When she finds a mysterious pair of shoes on the subway, she has no idea what horror they will bring. Soon friends and family are coming to grisly ends, with the shoes reappearing no matter what happens to them. Can interior designer In-chul (Kim Seong-su) help her get to the bottom of the mystery of the shoes before it harms herself or her child?

Paying homage to the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, via Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film of the same name, this is director Kim Yong-gyun’s take on the Red Shoes legend (even if the shoes in question are in fact pink). Sure, Yong-gyun uses all the familiar Asian horror motifs – the girl with hair over her face, the rancid apartment, the slightly deranged mother, and so on – yet there’s an intelligence to the script, as well as his keenly honed direction, mean this film rises above the abundance of Asian horrors available.

At its heart there he seems to want to comment on women’s position in Korean society (and to a certain extent society in general). There’s no doubt that Sun-jae is intimidated and even bullied by her husband, having lost her independence, as well as her own job, to play mother to his child. Yet she emphasises her own female fragility by indulging her obsession for shoes, for which her husband only ridicules her further.

Meanwhile bringing up a child on her own brings tensions in her relationship with her daughter to the surface. Surely Yong-Gyun is not implying that excuses what happens next, but perhaps that those events are no so surprising?

Reminiscent in many ways of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, the approach makes more of those familiar characteristics we’ve seen so much of before. No surprise to find it is, once again, a lead character on the edge of madness. Yet the imaginative cinematography and production design lift this above being just another Asian horror knockoff.

There’s something rather gothic about the world in which we find our characters, it’s already darker and more stylised than our own before anything untoward happens. It definitely brings to mind the gorgeous, if shadowy, style and design of Dario Argento on films like Suspiria and Profondo Rosso (of course!). And many of it’s inhabitants are just as barmy!

It’s only the main characters that hold back the film from being really successful. In-chul aside, the ultimately moral script by Yong-gyun and Ma Sang-Ryeol just doesn’t allow you to like them enough to really care.

Still, this looks a delight and packs a punch with proper frights and gore along the way. So next time your girlfriend argues how much she needs that pair of Jimmy Choo’s, well, perhaps you’d better just let her have them…!

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This entry was published by Andy H on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Films, Horror, Reviews, South Korea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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