re:mote voices

Title:Bunhongsin
Cast: Hye-su Kim, Seong-su Kim, Yeon-ah Park, Su-hee Go, Eol Lee
Director: Yong-gyun Kim

Bunhongsin is a Korean film, which I am informed has been doing big business in South Korea recently. Though given some of the biggest banking films I have seen from Korea, that doesn't necesarily provide a good guide. Given the English title of The Red Shoes, Bunhongsin presumably has some basis on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, he is credited on the IMDB page if nothing else. As yet, Bunhongsin is not being shown widely outside Asia, this early showing being a last minute substition in FrightNight's collaboration with The Glasgow Film Festival - the original Great Yohai War by Miike Takashi having been detained at another festival.

Sun-jae (Hye-su Kim) is an accomplished eye-doctor, on the brink of opening her own clinic. Even so, her husband treats her like dirt, having nothing but criticism for her. The fact that thier daughter, Tae-su (Yeon-ah Park) is clearly favoured by the father and is entirely spoilt exacerbates the situation. So when Sun-jae comes home to find her husband in bed with another woman it is the last straw. She drags her daughter away from the family home, and the pair set up in a dingy little flat.

This stage has a clear Dark Water vibe going on, the mother and daughter, the dingy flat, the ideas of relationships. Though Sun-jae is not your usual vulnerable downtrodden wife, she is obssessed with shoes. So it isn't long before she has her glass display cases set up, taking up half the flat, and showing her shoes off for all they are worth. This is where the complication comes in, when one day on the underground Sun-jae comes across a pair of shoes. An exquisite pair of pink high heels, just sitting there. Too good to be true, obviously, since these shoes are cursed. Which of course nudges us into The Ring/Phone territory, though instead of a video tape or mobile phone we have a pair of shoes.

Like many Asian horror films Bunhongsin is about parenthood and the relationship between mother and daughter. Here though, while the horror aspects are pretty much run of the mill, the actual relationship has a little more dynamite to it than what we usually encounter. The daddy's girl relationship, the spoilt little girl dynamic, excercises a real power here. Building up a fury and violence of emotion between the pair, especially when you add the force of the red shoes to the equation.

For the most part Bunhongsin progresses as all of these films do. Set up an object, set up a dead girl, set up a haunting, set up revenge. As such Bunhongsin isn't really anything remarkable, though it is watchable enough. However, in the end Bunhongsin goes all Switchblade Romance on us, just as things are about to wrap up and you think you know what is happening, everything goes barmy and you are left thinking, what the hell was that all about?