Gretel and Hansel: An odd fairy-tale take that loses its way after it's out of the woods
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
I’m not sure the twists of fate that prevented Disney from Disney-fying the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel & Gretel (other than a cutesy Silly Symphony short in the ‘30s). But it is refreshing to see the story in all its gritty Grimm-ness in Gretel and Hansel.
An odd, dark little film that loses its way after it leaves the woods, Gretel and Hansel by Oz Perkins (son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins), weirdly retains the sum of the ages of its protagonists. Instead of two 12-year-olds, Gretel and Hansel are a 16-year-old girl (Sophia Lillis) saddled with her eight-year-old brother (Sammy Leakey).
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) is an insecure guest of Holda the Witch (Alice Krige) in Gretel and Hansel.
This gives Gretel agency over the events in the movie (and a little brother whose only role is that of his sister’s burden and potential witch-food).
The bones of the story remain. After a narrative about the legend of a young girl given demonic powers by a witch (there’s an awful lot of narration in this movie), we meet our hungry title siblings – whose father recently died - and their mother. The latter of whom is at such wit’s end, she demands her children leave home and start walking, else she would chop them up and eat them.
Did I mention this is not a kids’ movie? Hanging over the siblings’ unsure trek is the reality that the only thing they have to offer is Gretel’s “intactness,” which is creepily mentioned by one well-heeled letcher offering a roof over their heads in the opening scenes.
Perkins has a knack for mood. And even though relatively little happens during Gretel and Hansel’s trek through the dark woods (near Langley, B.C), viscerally unsettling silhouettes appear at night and disappear at a glance, the wind whispers, and there’s even a lively hallucination scene (after the starving siblings decide to chance eating some colorful mushrooms).
Gretel seems an unlikely person to fall for a witch’s charms. In both her narration and onscreen, the Brooklyn-born Lillis delivers her American-accented lines with an almost depressed listlessness (by contrast, kid-brother Leakey has an unmistakable British accent). When they are briefly offered shelter by a kindly woodsman (Charles Babalola), she wonders whether there can be such a thing as kindness without anything expected in return.
The movie and the mood changes when they arrive at the witch’s house, which is sadly not made of gingerbread, but is constantly and inexplicably full of food enough to feed a village. It also has an apparent force-field that repels a large rock hurled by Gretel when her brother is initially trapped inside.
The force-field is appropriate, since Holda the Witch is played by Alice Krige, best known as the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact. Though the house in the woods is cleverly designed (and seems to go on forever), we obviously have a better idea of what’s going on than Gretel (or her brother, who is so annoyingly self-absorbed, he might be a child in a Roald Dahl story).
There is a sense at this point that Perkins and scriptwriter Rob Hayes weren’t sure where to take the story at this point. The set-up is obviously about Gretel’s empowerment, in this case literally, which made it a little too super-heroish to me.
As mentioned, there’s a lot of explaining going on (apparently, after confused test screenings, extra narration was ordered, to the extent that this is one prosaically talky film). There’s also an “explanation” offered at the end that leaves more questions than it answers.
At an hour and a half, Gretel and Hansel shouldn’t be a slog. But at a certain point in the last act, it definitely labours for its chills - and all that feasting eventually leaves the audience more hungry than scared.
Gretel and Hansel. Directed by Oz Perkins. Writter by Rob Hayes. Starring Sophia Lillis, Samuel Leakey and Alice Krige. Opens wide, Friday, January 31.