GRETEL & HANSEL: Your Kids Will Love It, Probably
Rating: 🧙♀️🧙♀️🧙♀️🧙♀️
[Trailer]
For some moviegoers, a horror film getting a PG-13 rating is a mark of death: the result of cutting down important sequences in order to market the movie to a wider audience. This attitude is probably also coupled with a cultural disdain toward children’s entertainment in general and a dash of whatever you’d call this fresh hell that big tent-pole studio efforts producing sanitized, all-ages cinematic theme park rides have put us into.
Director Osgood Perkins seems to understand that kids can benefit from a little fear from time to time: in his introduction to the film screening I attended, he mentioned how happy he was at how many “young-ish” faces he saw in the audience. This fact is especially important for the coming-of-age story that Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel ends up being.
Gretel, played by Sophia Lillis, is burdened by her approaching womanhood (and all that entails) and by her new responsibility to care for her younger brother. Sent out into the woods to fend for themselves with nothing even resembling a trail of crumbs, the siblings stumble across a triangular cottage.
Triangles dominate the early shots of Gretel & Hansel’s beautiful compositions. Usually, there’s a witch in the center—Holda the witch, played by Alice Krige (the Borg Queen!), or the young witch in the film’s fable-within-a-fable. Holda invites the children in for a feast straight out of Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s from this point that the film subverts the classic tale’s structure, instead turning into a story about power, who wields it, and at what cost.
There’s certainly a lot to find at fault with the movie: the dialogue, especially Krige’s, can sometimes be hard to understand, and the Mr. Robot-esque off-center framing gets in the film’s own way sometimes. However, I chalk all of this up to the conditions at the particular screening. I’d gladly see it again, even though this movie is absolutely not made for me, and I’m glad it exists. It never feels like it’s pandering or ironically winking to the audience in an attempt to stay relevant, and save for some stray moments of Obvious Voice-Over, respects its intended audience’s intelligence. It also has the most dismembered body parts I think I’ve ever seen in a PG-13 movie. It’s refreshing to see an adaptation engaging with its source material in a more creative way than most—and for a January release, no less.