Gretel and Hansel – A review

Hansel, and his older sister Gretel, are on the road to better things. Their mother casted them out. So they have to fend for themselves. On the road they stumble upon a cabin in the woods with a nice old lady happy to take them in. But there is something quite sinister at play here as Gretel soon finds out.

My first experience with Hansel and Gretel in a movie-form was with the Olsen twins. They’d grown up and after Full house and made a series of their own movies. One of the first was an adaptation of the famous Grimm fairytale. One of the twins was Gretel and the other one played Hansel.

Things have somewhat come full circle now with this horror rendition. Here we have Sophia Lillis who after her career defining turn in both chapters of IT (2019) took this movie as one of her first new projects.

As is usual by now, teen actresses apparently have to do two or three horror movies. Nobody really knows why but after Chloe Grace Moretz, Joey King, Lulu Wilson and Sterling Jernis so does Lillis. Scream queens are getting younger. 

Style over story

Gretel and Hansel isn’t truly an acting piece. Every bit of acting is very subdued. It is the style and the
mood that takes the forefront here. And yes every shot in this movie paints quite the picture.

Just the brown-yellow tint whenever Gretel is in the ‘house’; works marvels. Yellow is the colour of danger here as she could’ve seen in the yellow windows as she and her brother approached the cabin.

Then there are all the lines that work as a repoussoir pushing the foreground back as it were. Making the image translucent even though it is there. The wonderful pyramid shape of the cabin which, like any other pyramid, is a morgue. Triangles rule in this movie as they entice the viewer further into the occult.

Not to mention the set of the big final which is, basically, a white room. Stylish, unbothered by the bloodshed that came before, clean. Of course this ‘clean’ room gets a healthy dosage of blood.

Gory fairytales

Like previous horror-versions of famous fairytales I would argue that Gretel and Hansel would sit rather comfortably next to The company of wolves (1984) and Snow White: a tale of Terror (1997). They all breathe this sense of a time long past where fantasy and terror were very real upon this green earth, and often interlinked with shackles.

I’ve said it before one this blog and I might have to put this disclaimer up somewhere: my stomach for gore and horror is quite strong nowadays. I’m not a big fan of (unnecessary) gore but I’m not really bothered by it either. So unless I missed something I can tell you that this version of Gretel and Hansel is rather tame when it comes to the whole cannibal aspect of the fairytale. There is a severed arm her and there and the obligatory bucket of guts but that’s about it. The whole eating/song scene in The Lord of the Rings: The return of the king (2003) is a lot more disturbing (a scene that would’ve fit perfectly in this movie).

In the end most of the critique Gretel and Hansel got from reviewers is that the style over substance doesn’t truly work. Maybe the criticasters are right. At least, I can tell, for a movie trying to appeal to a mayor audience it started lacking a bit from the halfway mark on.

But as the movie to complete the dark fairytale trilogy that began with The company of wolves; I think Gretel and Hansel works rather nicely. Now we have the three great tales of Grimm covered in horror.