This saccharine drama pivots around aspiring ballerina Sam (Juliet Doherty), who we meet as she is about to go on stage to dance in a production of The Red Shoes (presumably a version of the Matthew Bourne ballet-drama). But in one of those dramatic twists of fate that would set even the Brothers Grimm’s eyes rolling, her sister Annie calls to wish her good luck seconds before she takes the stage – and then promptly gets hit and killed by a passing car.
Obviously, this rather ruins Sam’s big night, and she gives up on dancing altogether. She subsequently falls in with a teenage tearaway named Eve (Lauren Esposito) who, like Sam, is a young American living in Australia for reasons left inexplicably vague. A sequence of screenwriting contrivances wash Sam back up at her old dance academy, run by termagant dance mistress Miss Harlow (Carolyn Bock, a hoot), and Sam is compelled to wash the floors as a form of community service for a shoplifting offence. Whaddya know; before long she’s back in the toe shoes, taking over a role when mean-girl rival Gracie (Primrose Kern) is injured and it turns out only Sam knows the choreography.
Honestly, the Angelina Ballerina books and TV show for ballet-crazy primary schoolgirls offer a more dramatically plausible portrait of the world of dance than this tosh, directed by Jesse Ahern and Joanne Samuel. (The latter is arguably best known for playing the late wife of Mel Gibson’s character in the original Mad Max film, although some may recall her performance as Mrs Bingle in The Wiggles Movie.)
That said, Doherty is a real-live dancer in the actual world, so she can really bust a move or drop a plié. And while the rise-fall-rise trajectory plotted here of an understudy-underdog is as corny and calloused as a dancer’s foot, there are little details in the background that have the smell of authenticity about them, like the way the dancers bash their shoes on the ground to break them in, or study the choreography on notation that to anyone else look like hieroglyphic drawings.
• The Red Shoes: Next Step is released on 25 August in UK cinemas, and is available on digital platforms in Australia.
