Here is an old Korean riddle: What is the monster that opens its mouth wide and gobbles up your foot every morning? A shoe, of course.

Sun-jae (Kim Hye-su, Hypnotized, YMCA Baseball Team), an eye-doctor-turned-housewife, finds her cold, inattentive husband (Lee Uhl, Samaritan Girl, The Addicted) cheating with a younger woman. Abandoning her affluent suburban life, she moves into a decrepit studio apartment with her six-year daughter Tae-soo (Pak Yeon-a). Preparing to resume her medical career, Sun-jae is befriended by an interior designer In-cheol (Kim Seong-su, Sweet Sex and Love). Her life, however, plunges into an abyss of paranoia and nightmare after she picks up a pair of pink shoes (Hans Christian Andersen's cruel fairy tale Red Shoes, on which the film's premise is obliquely based, has mostly been known as Pink Shoes in Korean. Don't ask me why) lying about inside a subway car. Not only have this pair of shoes apparently performed wholly unnecessary amputation surgeries on the select individuals foolish enough to don them, they also become objects of unhealthy obsession for the ballet-dancing tyke Tae-soo. Unfortunately, this obsession is shared by Sun-jae. Soon mother and daughter are screeching and pulling each other's hair over the possession of the high-heeled monstrosity, which turns out to have an awful backstory reaching back into the colonial period.

 To my initial annoyance, it looked as if Red Shoes would follow the tiresome path of a "cursed object" exerting supernatural influence over the characters, substituting a pair of cursed shoes for a cursed cell phone, a cursed webpage, a cursed D-cup brassier and whatnot. However, it soon became clear that the "meat" of the film's horror was to be found in its unflinching exploration of psychology of the central protagonist, Sun-jae, as a divorced single mother full of unacknowledged emotions and desires. This is not really surprising, given that director Kim Yong-gyun's debut feature was Wanee and Junah (2001), both disturbing and sweet in its measured engagement with the story of an unmarried couple.

Like Kim Hye-su's previous film Hypnotized, Red Shoes is visually arresting, occasionally reaching out to the realm of exquisite and enigmatic beauty. Some of the ideas, such as the flurry of snowflakes that turns pink and then blood-red, are simple yet effective. The sequences set in the subway station, under the eyes of DP Kim Tae-gyung (director of the unfortunate Ryung a.k.a Ghost), make interesting use out of deliberately out-of-focus and grainy pictures. Art direction by Jang Bak-ha and Im Hyun-tae help create the oppressive yet strangely gorgeous Modern Gothic world, with spiral staircases, blinking fluorescent bulbs and blue-green shadows pooling in the corners of a workspace or a child's bedroom, contrasted against the archly theatrical, red-and-khaki-draped colonial decadence in the dialogue-less flashback. (The pro-Japanese Empire "propaganda" dance performance that climaxes the flashback sequence is, perhaps ironically, the movie's most beautiful set piece) Lee Byung-woo (Tale of Two Sisters, Untold Scandal) blends pipe organ, vocal murmurs, buzzing electronic noise and other elements into another of his great film scores.

Nonetheless, Red Shoes is ultimately a frustrating experience. As Darcy has pointed out in a recent Cine 21 piece, Korean horror films cannot seem to resist adding last-minute "revelations" that supposedly "explain" the character's weird behavior, Swiss Cheese holes in the plot, and other uncertainties and irrationalities. The result is usually more confusion, not less, on the part of the viewers. Red Shoes has one of these groan-inducing, utterly redundant Final Twists, revealed a good five minutes after the film's emotional climax has been reached. And if you could figure out just what in the name of Baby Jesus' diapers has actually happened to Tae-soo at the end, then you are either a telepath attuned to the brainwaves of writers Kim Yong-gyun and Ma Sang-ryul, or endowed with, shall I say, very active imagination. Ironically, it was director Kim's assured command of "routine" horror mechanics, rather than his "arthouse" sensibilities, that really held the film together and kept my interest going, at least until the depressingly familiar denouement.

On the other hand, Kim Hye-su's fans will be pleased, as Sun-jae's character is an excellent showcase for her acting chops, far more so than Hypnotized, where she faced an uphill battle against her electric-storm hairdo. How we are supposed to respond to Sun-jae herself constitutes a more difficult problem. Caught between the cold bastard of a husband and the cocky and smarmy boyfriend, she could be seen as a portrait of a contemporary Korean woman yearning for self-realization and fulfillment of basic desires, even at the risk of destroying her family and social life. In the end, however, the filmmakers seem to prefer the other interpretation, essentially accusing and sentencing Sun-jae for the sin of being truthful to her desires. In this sense, too, Red Shoes, despite its artistic gloss and undeniably creative touches, perhaps remains a conventional horror film, ultimately unable to illuminate the hidden recesses of the (female) mind.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)