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Nov
04
2005

AFI Fest Report: The Red Shoes Review

Posted by Todd Brown at 11:42am.

Posted in Film & DVD Reviews , Horror, Asia, Random Festival News.

redshoes.jpg

I know our very own X is planning on giving the DVD release of this one his customary uber-detailed treatment - complete with a rundown / translation of the extended footage - but in the meantime here’s Peter Martin with a look at Korean horror flick The Red Shoes from the AFI Fest.

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Dazzling, bruising, and hysterical, THE RED SHOES doesn’t so much tell a story as assault the senses.

In a creepy scene set at a subway station, two women fight over a pair of abandoned red shoes. One walks
away the apparent winner, but a trail of blood and severed feet soon follow.

One of the women, Sun-jae (Kim Hye-soo), moves into a new apartment with her daughter, Tae-soo (Park Yeon-ah). Sun-jae’s marriage was rather loveless, but when she discovered her husband was having an affair,
she took off with their little girl. So the tension is already beginning to boil when the red shoes exert a strange attraction to all who come in contact with them, pitting mother against daughter, and friend against friend. Dismembered bodies begin piling up.

The death scenes are gruesomely operatic, which might satisfy gorehounds, and there’s no denying that director Kim Young-gyun has an eye for dense visual compositions. Unfortunately, the performances are too shrill to engender any great degree of sympathy for the characters, and this adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale stumbles when it tries to apply modern psychology to childhood nightmares.

More information—including the trailer—can be accessed via Korean distributor CineclickAsia’s web
site, as well as the film’s own Korean-language web site.

THE RED SHOES does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will have its International Premiere at AFI FEST on Wednesday, November 9 at 10:00 p.m. and will also play on Friday, November 11, at 9:45 p.m.

Ticket information is available at the AFI FEST web site.

Review by Peter Martin.

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Reader Comments

  1. x 11/04/2005 @ 4:02pm

    I started working on it yesterday, actually. Expect the review for middle next week. Finally!
    ——-

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