Bunhongsin (The Red Shoes)

(2005) ****

The film opens with a girl waiting at the subway station for her friend. She spots a pair of red shoes just sitting there, she walks over and puts them on. Suddenly her friend shows up and the two girls start fighting over the shoes. The friend finally yanks them off her feet and puts them on herself. Next thing we know the girl is on the floor screaming and her feet have been ripped off.

Now we switch to a story of a husband & wife with obvious tension between them and their young daughter Tae-su. Sun-jae, comes home to find her husband with another woman. She takes her daughter and leaves before the husband even knows she's there. She moves into a small apartment with her daughter and we presume she does not tell her husband where she is. Sun-jae is riding the subway one night and finds the red shoes just sitting there. She picks them up and puts them in her bag. Here is where the trouble begins. It seems that every woman who sees these shoes gets insanely obsessed with them.

Tae-su spots her mother's new shoes and she is not invulnerable to their power. She puts them on one day while her mother is out. As she admires herself in the mirror we see that what Tae-su is seeing is a more beautiful version of herself. When her mother comes home the two get into a phsyical squabble over the shoes. Tae-su tries hiding them in her room but Sun-jae finds them. She wears them out to impress a young male interior designer who is designing her new eye clinic for her. When she returns home wearing the shoes Tae-su flips out tearing the shoes from her mother's feet then shutting herself in her room. Sun-jae's friend shows up in the middle of this, she sees Tae-su running off with the shoes. She goes into the child's room and physically manhandles the shoes from the child. We see her next walking down the street wearing the shoes.

Shortly after that she dies in a freak accident where her feet end up being cut off mid leg. Sun-jae now starts to realize that there is something wrong with the shoes. She tries throwing them away but they just keep coming back.

She needs to figure out how to break the curse of the shoes before it's too late for young Tae-su.

This is loosely based on the famous Hans Christian Andersen story but with a lot more violence and bloodshed. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I loved the story and the macabre twist on the original fairy tale. The physical struggles that occur over these shoes, especially between mother and daughter are so realistic that I had to wonder how they filmed it without being tagged for child abuse. The obsession seems just so real. J-horror does it for me again, a great flick.