Movie Reaction: Gretel & Hansel

Formula: The Brothers Grimm / The Witch

When it comes to horror, it's better to rate era by the style rather than the specific movies. Even in the best-case scenario, the majority of horror movies that get released will be schlock. It's a genre that invites lazy imitations. A fan has to sift through a lot of bad to find the good. I prefer to think of horror in terms of the influences at the time. For example, I don't care for slashers, even post-modern ones, so the late 90s run of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and all the copies did nothing for me. I hated the "torture porn" run of Saw and Hostel through The Human Centipede in the mid 00s. On the other hand, I love found footage, so I've had a feast over the last decade, even though most found footage horror movies are quite bad. The latest horror trend that I'm all about is what I'm calling "A24 horror". This includes movie like The Witch, Hereditary, and Midsommar that aren't as concerned with jump scares as they are with creating dread. I carry these movies with me for a while after I seen them. They get a lot of run out of only a couple really scary moments, because the rest of the movie primes the audiences to be unsettled. I've loved this trend in horror, and it's exciting to see that the imitators have finally arrived, in this case, with a riff on the classic fairy tale Hansel & Gretel.

Gretel & Hansel is an updated take on the classic story. Still set in a roughly 1800s Germanic region, the two children are cast out of their home because their mother can't afford to take care of them anymore (and she's gone insane). The siblings go down a path in the forest, looking for work. Along the way, they find a house owned by an older woman and it's always filled with delicious food. They begin to live with her for a while as strange things start happening around them. Guess what? She's a witch and she's been sacrificing children. The movie assumes you know the Hansel & Gretel story already and occasionally has fun with those expectations. Other than giving the witch a backstory (that reminded me a lot of The Ring), it doesn't spend a lot of time explaining what's going on. It devotes a lot of time to dreams that Gretel keeps having (at least she thinks they are dreams) in which a lot of weird and unsettling stuff happens.

This movie gets a lot of the creepy imagery right. The production design is all about using distinctive shapes with the architecture. They understand the value of a high ceiling in a dark room. It's perpetually overcast outside, which is an obvious but effective tone-setter. At times, the foreignness of all the environments reminded me some of Under the Skin from a few years ago.

The movie never sucked me in though. It's sort of boring. The scenes didn't really fit together. It was more like a collection of images than a full story. Or, as I heard another person in my theater put it as they were leaving: "OK, but what was that even about?" It didn't effectively build an atmosphere that I could get sucked into. It felt like imitation of what Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) or Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) have done in the past.

The casting didn't help. Sophia Lillis (playing Gretel) is a fine young actress, even in other horror movies (It: Chapter I). She comes off as far too modern in this period movie. And maybe that's just the haircut. She felt out of place the whole time. Hansel is played by Samuel Leakey. I don't like to insult child performances. I mean, how much can I really expect out of someone still in grade school? Let's just say he wasn't very naturalistic. A Room-era Jacob Tremblay would've helped this movie a lot.

The biggest limitation to the movie is that there isn't much to the Hansel & Gretel story. They show up to the house, eat a lot, and try to not get killed by a witch. That's it. The movie struggles to fill time, even at a brief 87 minutes. For example, there's a scene where they eat psychedelic mushrooms. That only exists to pad the time. I'm happy if this is the kind of horror that studios want to start trying more often. I'm sure most of them will also be bad, but I'd happily watch a dozen Gretel & Hansels over another Conjuring universe spin-off.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend