The Red Shoes: A Strange Movie About Women

I watched a Korean horror movie called 'The Red Shoes' recently, and it was a total accident, because I had meant to watch the 1948 movie of the same name. Oops!

Made in 2005, the most important thing to know about this film right away, is that the shoes featured in it are not red. They're pink. This has befuddled many an English-speaking Letterboxd user, many of whom cried and screamed and threw up when seeing these incongruent shoes - but the truth is: the Korean title of the film is actually The Pink Shoes. This is a simple translation issue. Mystery solved. Stop crying. It's okay.

Now, this movie oozes with a certain style. There's a fabulous blue-green colour grading on this thing, which means that yes, we are in Twilight mode. That feels right, and I love to see it. We open in a startlingly empty train station, where a girl sees these dazzling pink pumps, and thinks: yeah, I need those.

Sadly, her nasty little friend shows up and grabs the shoes for herself, but she promptly dies, so here we are right away with the truth revealed to us: the shoes are cursed, and they will kill you.

From there, we meet our protagonist who is mega-divorced (yay!) and struggling a bit with the care of her young child. One day she sees these damn shoes on a train, and she picks them up, because she has a high heel addiction and she can't resist them.

The movie feels very confused for the most part. Everyone simply starts acting weird because of these shoes, and we see about a million scenes of someone seeing the shoes and then screaming at the person who currently has the shoes. The mother and her approximately four-year-old daughter have the same shoe-based screaming match a number of times, which I guess is just what motherhood can be like, but I personally didn't need that many iterations of it.

Anyway, it turns out that the shoes belonged to an evil Japanese woman or something, and in the movie's greatest moment, we see a flashback of a stage set with an insanely striking Imperial Japanese flag during the occupation of Korea. This is where a dance will be performed (featuring the shoes) in front of all the Japanese soldiers.

It's incredibly arresting and you're thinking, oh wow, okay, let's get into some scary occupation stuff - that's amazing! But sadly, the movie mostly only makes vague allusions to this. Yes, there's a Japanese vs Korean woman drama about a cheating husband and murderous wife, but it all feels unfortunately soap opera, too focused on the deeply uninteresting personal troubles of the ghostly shoe-wearers, and neglectful of the genuinely harrowing setting with its immaculate imagery.

In the end, the movie has a strange and somewhat interesting view of woman-rage. We see the futile woman vs woman destruction sown by these shoes (pink, not red because... that's the woman colour), we see the creepy way it encroaches on the malleable psyche of the young daughter when she starts being sort of possessed by the shoes and wearing makeup, and we reach an immense freakout from our protagonist, too twisted by her reliance on shallow markers of femininity to cope, damning her daughter as a threat and an adversary in her pursuit of the shoes.

It's an interesting movie in its exploration of femininity as a spectre haunting women through the ages, but it has little to say on the matter, and is so one-note that it's hard to interpret as anything but a misogynistic tale of the fickleness and unpredictability of the ladies. They all just go feral with uncontrollable consumerism. It's just like with Labubus.

There are some undeniably haunting images though.

Two ugly shoes out of five. 

 ★★☆☆☆