[Review] Gretel and Hansel(2020) {6/10}

Directed by Oz Perkins from a screenplay by Rob Hayes, the film stars Sophia Lillis (Gretel), Sam Leakey (Hansel) and Alice Krige (Holda / The Witch). It is based on the German folklore tale"Hansel and Gretel" by the Brothers Grimm.

The plot follows a time of famine and hardship. A widow, at her wits' end, throws her children out of the house to fend for themselves. Older sister Gretel (Sophia Lillis) takes charge of her younger brother, Hansel (Samuel Leakey), but it's not long before they get hungry. A hunter (Charles Babalola) helps them along, and soon they find a house with an inviting feast laid out on the table. An old woman (Alice Krige) invites the children in and allows them to stay, for a little while, in exchange for doing some chores. Gretel fears that something is wrong, but then the old woman starts teaching her about how to unleash her inner, hidden strengths. Everything seems to be going fine until Hansel disappears.

It's near-impossible to surprise your audience when you're re-imagining a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Thanks to Disney, a good chunk of the duo's collected folk stories have been heavily sanitized and seared into the public's consciousness over the past century. Although it has the makings of a typical gritty Hollywood revisionist fairy tale, Gretel & Hansel starts off heading in a much more interesting direction by focusing on Gretel's journey into adulthood instead. Both Lillis and Krige are compelling in their roles, with Lillis' quieter and more introspective performance matched by the latter's coiled turn as the movie's bloodthirsty, yet strangely charismatic, antagonist. Director Oz Perkins carefully ratchets up the dread and tension through their interactions in a slow-burn fashion. This strange, austere, artful, violent retelling of the old fairy tale is one of those movies that's more moody than scary. It won't be to every taste, but it's weirdly poetic and mesmerizing. The throwback electronic music score by French composer Rob also helps create an unsettling, otherworldly quality. The thing that holds Gretel & Hansel back is, simply, it can only stray so far from the source material before it has to tell the same old story. It's a pretty short film, yet for all its creepy atmosphere, its pacing is sluggish and the movie struggles to pad things out before getting to the "twist" everyone knows is coming. The resulting climax is oddly rushed and, well, anticlimactic, which prevents Gretel & Hansel from paying off Gretel's coming of age thread in a satisfying manner and only makes the film's brand-new ingredients feel all the more like filler. As interesting as Gretel & Hansel sounds on paper when you break down what it's trying to do, the actual movie is a bit of a darkly beautiful bore. There are a handful of freaky moments and some captivating acting by its female leads, yet it falls short of re-imagining the original Grimm fairy tale as a fully engaging coming of age horror-fantasy parable.

Gretel & Hansel is now available on Digital and Blu-ray.