Wonderful character development!

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I've read people complaining about the shoes being pink (they're magenta/fuchsia to be precise) instead of red, I'm more concerned about the fact that those shoes aren't made for ballet, not even flamenco shoes have heels that high, they don't even look like a pair of shoes you could find in the 40s (but I might be wrong on this) and I wish this was the only problem about this movie! This movie is all about clichés, plot holes and bad written twists. It mixes the classic Red shoes tale with the basic revenge-themed ghost stories, but it does it wrong and makes no sense at all. This movie will only give you a headache for trying to find some kind of logic in this mediocrity award winning piece of @#?!. If you're looking for a well scripted movie this is not the case.

If you could imagine all of the Asian horror clichés thrown into a single film, then with every single aspect cranked up to 11 without any cleverness or reason, you'd get a pretty bad film. Make it a couple of notches worse and you'd almost get The Red Shoes. There is absolutely no cleverness, no wit, no intelligence behind this film. Everything is exaggerated and amplified to the point where nothing is tied together, and every opportunity for gratuitous gore and violence thrown under the excuse of "psychological thriller" is used. The film is so over-the-top that it could be passed off as an acid, mean-spirited satire of Asian horror with perhaps a few small changes.The film manages something impressive: while it shows absolutely no restraint in terms of jump scares, gore shots and blood gushing, the film isn't really unpredictable, and the story as a whole follows every single rule in the book. Everything is there. It's even worse than Avatar in terms of following the conventions. And you can't even use the argument that "the visuals are pretty" here, because everything is so in-your-face, it's downright tragic: the monochromatic shots, the blurriness, the uncomfortable close-ups, the occasional Shaky-Cam, and so on and on. Just avoid this film. Even if you're genuinely scared by horror films, go pick something better.

I have watched a lot of Asian horror films lately, and this is certainly one of the best of the lot. The cinematography is top notch, and is made even more powerful by the lighting effects.The casting is good, the acting fine, and the direction superb. There are some images in this movie you won't be able to shake.I've noticed some people didn't like the pacing, and thought the plot borrowed too much from some standard elements of Asian horror. Personally, I think the movie was intentionally a bit oddly paced, as it leads you to the twists more effectively. From what I can tell the "borrowed" elements of plot and image merely cement this film's place in the Asian style of horror. In other words, I don't see that as a downside. All cowboy movies have horses. Big deal. It's part of the genre. There are still good ones and bad ones with many similar elements.Asian horror is the same way, and this film is one of the good ones.

The unrelenting power of Korean schlock horror, stunning photography, and a much revisited fairytale are the components of this colourful piece of work that goes that little bit further than the modern woman's obsession to spend a week's wages on nice footwear.There are a few flaws - the red shoes in question, for instance, are more fuchsia pink, there is a heavy reliance on far east stock-in-trades such as hags with hair hanging over their faces to look creepy, and I was unable to resist comparing the women fighting over said shoes to hobbits fighting over a Ring; but I'll leave all those Sméagol-becomes-Gollum analogies to Lord of the Rings addicts, and tell you that Red Shoes is an overlong but ingenious dose of blood and gore, with some beautiful dance scenes and vague psychological meditations on the nature of repressed greed, vengeful ghosts, and getting your legs chopped off at the ankles.The photography draws you in immediately. We enter a stark, brightly lit and virtual deserted subway station. The one thing that stands out are the bright 'red shoes', standing on a platform as if someone has stepped out of them onto a train. Two girls fight viciously over them. CGI's kick in nice and early with a trail of blood drawing itself up into the shoes. The second theme makes its appearance before the end of the opening titles as a ballerina goes through her beautiful and lyrical practice.Having set the tone, people start getting bumped off as the shoes start controlling events by controlling their wearer's desires. The have a strange magical power - the protagonist's daughter suddenly becomes a much better dancer after stealing them, but the shoes are inhabited by a curse that gets a bit nasty when someone takes them from the owner. Purists can concentrate to work out which scenes are hallucinations or dream sequences and which are not, while others just lean back and enjoy the bloodletting.We start with Sun-jae, who takes off from her wayward husband with her daughter Tae-soo. Sun-jae is an eye-doctor planning to own her own clinic, and soon strikes up a relationship with interior designer In-chul. She and her daughter fight over the shoes, which are then taken away by her friend who has an instant fancy for them. The friend has her eyeballs forked out for her trouble.The red shoes prove very hard to get rid of, even when they find the original owner. If you lose the plot half way through, you could do worse than simply enjoy the remarkable aesthetics - the wonderful glass shoe rack, the juxtaposition of horror and beauty, the wide-screen rendition which produces some effects unusual for a horror movie, the de-saturated backgrounds, the unusual framing that sticks in the memory - the sudden overhead shot of the table when Sun-jae is having dinner with the designer, or the beautiful shot of Sun-jae and Tae-soo bathing, like something from a classical painting.The dance digressions and occasional humour are sadly all too infrequent. "Fight quietly will you!? - the neighbours will call the police!" Or, replying to the mundane casual question, "What brand are they?" "Subway!" Instead, the constant scariness is eventually wearing. A change of pace, for instance, by developing the love-theme between Sun-jae and the designer, would have been most welcome.Towards the end I just wanted them to hurry up and wind up dead, although I liked the shoes falling through snowflakes and (in another scene) snowflakes made of blood. A theme that could have usefully been developed further is the idea of being "in the flow" as opposed to driven out of control by temptation and desire. The interior designer is one of the few people not affected by the shoes. He will only work when he "gets the vibe" and provides an almost protective force for Sun-jae. Yet attributing too much depth of meaning to what is basically a commercial horror-flick (the end-credits are interrupted to lay a foundation for Red Shoes II) is giving it too much credit: but if the current offering is too wacky for all except hard-core horror fans, the consummate artwork speaks of great potential and talent.