Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Review Rating: 7

Sun-Jae finds a pair of cursed heeled shoes on the subway, and her life soon falls to calamity and death all around her.

Yes, okay, lets just say this right off: the shoes aren’t red. They’re a dark pink, fuchsia at best. And I rather doubt that ballet dancers would wear heeled shoes, but that’s just for us fanatics. That’s about it for criticism, I can’t really fault the somewhat abstract way the movie was shot, as it is after all a Korean horror flick. It’s supposed to be somewhat muddled, but really in a good way.

So we have mother Sun-Jae, daughter Tae-Soo, the cheating husband and the new friend mother makes after leaving the cheating husband to create her own eye clinic, where the new friend is the interior decorator. Somewhere towards the beginning of this mess, is when Sun-Jae finds the shoes, and things get progressively odder as the movie continues on. Sun-Jae will tell her daughter Tae-Soo that Daddy couldn’t possibly have visited and stop lying, bear in mind this is after Tae-Soo said that Daddy’s cold and to take him out. If you’re a horror fan at all, you can make some fairly likely correct guesses just from that. As far as the shoes themselves go, I gather they belonged to a dancer from maybe the 40’s?, who was having an affair with a married man (the choreographer I think), and his own wifes jealousy ignites the whole curse when she kills the rival and takes the red shoes. That doesn’t stop the wife and husband from being killed themselves, I would say by the red shoes as well, and then those cursed heels go missing, get stolen, get up and walk off on their own, whatever. The story of the curse on the red shoes and how it relates to Sun-Jae doesn’t seem to fit well. I did rather enjoy what the curse of the red shoes did to her though. Her interesting shag haircut, not a norm for the asian horror medium, gives the opportunity for the wide-eyed fresh faced terrified mommy, in almost the same exact moment as the eye-slitted calculating jagged edged killer.

A little difficult to find, The Red Shoes is pretty fair for a genuine scare!