“The door slammed at our backs, and the big, bad world opened up to us”

By the time these chilling words are heard towards the beginning of Gretel & Hansel, we are already ensconced in the grim fairytale world director Osgood “Oz” Perkins has thrust us into, and escape is extremely unlikely, by virtue of both the story we’re about to be witness to, and the style in which it was executed. Perkins didn’t so much make a film as he conducted a cinematic séance, invoking the artistic spirits of the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Terrence Malick, using the work done by some of the more daring filmmakers as inspirations for his retelling of one of the western world’s most beloved stories, both in terms of his stylistic choices and the twisted approach he takes to a story that has inspired countless adaptations, whether directly or merely through vague inspiration. Not a film made for casual audiences who aren’t ready for the bleak, harrowing portrayal of horror that Perkins is insistent on infusing into every frame of this film, Gretel & Hansel is a massively terrifying example of subversive filmmaking, where the basic components of the original story intertwine with the director’s more brooding, atmospheric view of horror and how audiences perceive what we don’t know, making one of the year’s most fascinating, and outright unsettling, demonstration of fear, and how we negotiate our lives around avoidance of the unknown.

The past few decades have brought us many instances of directors taking beloved fairytales and folk stories, and combining them with elements of horror, as a way of challenging the sanitized versions of these old yarns that have been passed down between generations. As Angela Carter demonstrated in her seminal anthology, The Bloody Chamber, fairytales very rarely have their roots in the realm of the pleasant and the innocuous, and the original versions of these stories were far darker and filled with ideas and imagery that would unsettle even the most acclimated horror aficionado. Perkins, much like Carter, is not merely trying to reclaim these stories into their original form, but also to challenge some of the more conventional ideas associated with them. “Hansel and Gretel” is a story nearly all of us would have encountered earlier in our life, especially from a more Eurocentric perspective (alongside many other Grimm fairytales), so for Gretel & Hansel (already provoking discussion through the seemingly-minor change in the structure of the title) to approach a very simple story as less of a cautionary tale, but also something of a social message is fascinating. It might not always work, and this kind of commentary has certainly been done before, and has either succeeded wonderfully, or failed dismally. Yet, through the laborious efforts of a director whose intentions in bringing this classic story to life again, and in a way that was very different from what anyone on either side of the genre-debate would expect, result in a film that manages to manoeuvre around its minor shortcomings so well, they start to resemble merits rather than flaws, forming an incredibly compelling, and outright terrifying, version of a beloved tale.

There are a few elements of Gretel & Hansel that make it such a remarkable film. The first is Perkins’ approach to the story. The original version, or rather the one that is most commonly told, is relatively straightforward in how it conveys the concepts – two precocious children become lost in the woods, and are invited in by a kindly old woman who turns out to be a carnivorous witch preying on young, innocent victims, before resolving in a heroic ending. Gretel & Hansel keeps the skeletal structure, but develops it further than any other straight adaptation of the story has, as well as fundamentally changing some aspects of the story to serve the function of updating some of the themes, and adding in some new content in order to create a more compelling narrative, one separate from the adorable morality tale that children around the world are exposed to, but without impinging on what makes this such an endearing story in the first place. Essentially, the film approaches the original as a statement not only on childhood innocence and the dangers of the terrain outside of their home but also as an indictment on the terrors, both literal and metaphorical, that lurk in a very perilous world that preys on those who are weak and vulnerable. Perkins adds in a considerable amount of commentary on the nature of the character of Gretel, who occupies the central role here, as an embodiment of young feminity in how she’s developed. The director finds a fascinating avenue with which to take the character, blending the core of this story with other folkloric elements, such as witchcraft and the role women played in the society in which stories like this were written.

In bringing this story the screen, Perkins recruits a small cast of only a few actors, all of which are given pivotal roles in the story. The two standouts are unsurprisingly those tasked with playing the female characters, as this film (while not overtly stating it) clearly endeavours to repurpose the role women played in these societies, and how traditional fairytales presented femininity in the binary of either weak and helpless damsels who either need the assistance of male heroes, or work in conjunction with them, to succeed, or as the embodiment of evil, which assisted in the development of the indelible trope of the malevolent witch character who has pervaded cultural consciousness for centuries. Sophia Lillis continues a meteoric rise to worldwide acclaim with yet another understated, dedicated performance as the titular heroine, a teenager who is struggling to grapple with the fact that she’s on the precipice of womanhood, and is forced to realize that she must put aside her childish interests and not only care for her younger brother but also make a place for herself in the world, which unfortunately seems to come at the expense of her superficial traits and virginal state, rather than her clear dedication to learning helpful skills. Hansel, who is normally portrayed as the hero of the story, is here demonstrated as being just a young, impressionable lad who is expected to become far more useful to society than his sister. Here, his blind-faith in the world and inability to conceive of the malice lurking within it result in him becoming a victim of unseen sinister entities, which not only speaks to the underlying social commentary present in the film but also the disquieting demonstration of the horrifying intersections between vulnerability and the forces that prey on it.

This is sharply contrasted with the character of Holda (Alice Krige), an old woman who welcomes these two lost children into her home and becomes something of a guiding force to Gretel. The characterization of this character, who is normally described as nothing more than “The Witch” in other versions of the story, is incredible, with the story calling for her to actually have some personality and a role in the story other than just being purely a malignant obstacle to the protagonists. Krige derives every bit of potential from the character, playing her in such a sickly-sweet way, she lingers on the mind and etches a place in the consciousness of every viewer, which is even more impressive considering how subtle the performance actually is – with the exception of a few moments, the character is relatively subdued, caught between enchanting and repulsive, which is all credit to the efforts of those who decided to actually develop her beyond an archetype, and Krige’s extraordinary approach to interpreting the character. She instantly becomes one of the more interesting cinematic representations of a villain, mainly because she isn’t presented as a bundle of antagonistic quirks – there is a complete lack of caricatured madness or bombastic malice to be found anywhere in this performance, not even in the later stages, where her true intentions are made clear.  Gretel & Hansel is a film that may not be perfect, but even if we put aside some of the flaws, the work Krige does in not only bringing this character to the screen but also in how she is in full command of every frame, speaks to a truly exceptional performance that goes beyond the relatively simple confines of the film’s narrative.

Finally, the element that makes Gretel & Hansel such a fascinating film is also the one that brings all the rest together – if we momentarily look beyond the director’s approach to the story, and the performances he makes use of to convey his subversive messages, we can see that this is a supremely well-made film as well. So many of these films that purport to be darker adaptations of beloved stories tend to be rather tepid, with the belief that contrasting familiar tales with unhinged violence and terror will somehow enrich the meaning and give new meaning to the original work. Perkins seems to be vehemently against this, and like he had done with his previous films, he paid careful attention to the style with which he executed his version of the story. Drawing inspiration from many other artistic sources (including those mentioned at the outset of this review), Perkins seems to be intent on creating an uneasy atmosphere, one where the terror comes less from moments of brief shock, but from a lingering sense of ill-ease that pervades throughout the film. The combination of Perkins’ directorial vision, Galo Olivares’ cinematography and the haunting score by Robin Coudert converge into an unforgettable demonstration of pristine, gorgeously-unsettling horror. The director somehow manages to align this with the exceptional folk horrors made over the years (a genre that is severely underexplored, especially considering how terrifyingly effective they tend to be), where the beauty is derived from how starkly he represents the world in which this film takes place. Never venturing out of reality, Perkins portrays the “big, bad world” that is mentioned many times throughout as an arid landscape, where hope isn’t an oasis, but rather simply an escape from the shadows that follow these characters around, creating a truly haunting environment that the audience will find themselves becoming lost in almost instantly.

Standing on its own merits, Gretel & Hansel is an intriguing venture into the roots of the long-beloved traditions of storytelling, with Oz Perkins directing an unconventional version of a famous fairytale, and making it his own through various narrative and stylistic choices. The ability this film has to reclaim an old story and present it in a different way should be enough to set it apart from some of the more ill-conceived examples of adapting fairytales into more sinister stories. With this film, Perkins takes the central story, and the lesson it proposes and returns it to the version that the Brothers Grimm most likely original envisioned it to be, mainly through replicating a particular period by infusing an immense amount of detail into the design of the film, which gives it such an extraordinarily unsettling atmosphere. Yet, this doesn’t even account for the fact that Gretel & Hansel truly is just a massively scary film – filled with the kind of horrifying images that normally are not normally evoked in mainstream horror, Perkins’ version of this story is the embodiment of a waking nightmare, an audacious attempt to venture beyond the confines of conventional horror and present us with something even more disquieting. The film may sometimes struggle when it comes to propelling the story forward, as a result of turning “Hansel and Gretel” into a feature-length film, but in doing so, keeps the structure and intentions of the story the same, only adding in some elements that strengthen the central message and give it more nuance and depth. A terrific addition to the canon of brilliant folk horrors, Gretel & Hansel represents yet another triumph for Oz Perkins, who is rapidly becoming a potent voice in contemporary genre filmmaking. Definitely not the definitive version of this story, but certainly one of the most audacious, and in a genre where audacity is the more sparse commodity, we can do nothing other than praise Gretel & Hansel for its incredible originality and bold ability to frighten us through the most simple means imaginable.