The Red Shoes
★★Skip itIs The Red Shoes worth watching? (No spoilers)
If you love ballet, this is probably a classic. If you don't, it's long: the first half drags, the famous ballet sequence goes on and on, and the love interest is flat. The lead male dancer is the best part. Skip it unless ballet is your thing.
⚠️ Spoiler warning: everything below the quick take, including the full review and ending explained, contains spoilers.
The Red Shoes review
To be fair, ballet has never been for me, so a movie leaning heavily on long sequences of solely ballet was never going to make my top 20. Unlike other films like The Black Swan, this film let ballet take the main stage, and the play itself felt like the main character.
That being said, I still did not like this film. The first half was far too long, it felt as if every interesting scene was cut with 2 useless ones. The entire start of the film was never paid off, and it felt like much of the first 45 minutes could have been cut.
The 10ish minute cut of the Red Shoes play was incredibly boring to me, but again maybe I just needed to be a bigger ballet fan.
The second half was far more interesting, however nowhere near enough to save the film. The fight at the end was quite frustrating, as up until then the husband had never asked her to leave the studio for him, and it seemed very easy for her to dance for the studio, and stay married. Julian was just a very flat character, typical of male love interests of this time.
Honestly the only saving grace was the main male dancer, who was always interesting, and was well written and played.
The Red Shoes ending explained
Vicky Page has become a star at Boris Lermontov's ballet company, but she married the composer Julian, and Lermontov forced them out. Lermontov lures her back to dance The Red Shoes again. On opening night Julian shows up and begs her to leave with him; Lermontov demands she choose dance. Torn between them, she runs out of the theatre wearing the red shoes and falls (or jumps) in front of a train.
Dying, she asks Julian to take off the red shoes. Lermontov tells the audience she won't dance tonight, and the company performs the ballet with a spotlight on the empty space where she should be.
The ending mirrors the ballet's story: a girl whose red shoes won't let her stop dancing until they kill her. It's about being forced to choose between art and love, and the people around her making that choice impossible.
My take: the final fight didn't land, because Julian had never asked her to quit before. She could have danced and stayed married.
Does The Red Shoes have a post-credits scene?
No. The Red Shoes has no mid-credits or post-credits scene.
Movies like The Red Shoes
- Black Swan (2010) – a dancer destroyed by the pressure of one role
- Whiplash (2014) – an artist pushed to the edge by an obsessive mentor
- Phantom Thread (2017) – art, control and a tangled relationship
- A Star Is Born (2018) – fame and love pulling a performer in two directions