Gretel & Hansel (2020) Orion/Horror-Fantasy RT: 87 minutes Rated PG-13 (disturbing images, thematic content, brief drug material) Director: Oz Perkins Screenplay: Rob Hayes Music: Robin Coudert Cinematography: Galo Olivares Release date: January 31, 2020 (US) Cast: Sophia Lillis, Alice Krige, Samuel Leakey, Charles Babalola, Jessica De Gouw. Box Office: $15.3M (US)/$22.3M (World)
Rating: * ½
The dark fairy tale Gretel & Hansel is grim in all the wrong ways. Even the atmosphere at yesterday afternoon’s showing was markedly depressing. Despite my MOC (Multiplex of Choice) having 10 screens, the place was dead. You could practically hear crickets in the lobby. I was the only one in the theater showing Gretel & Hansel. That’s never a good sign. Low attendance usually indicates bad word of mouth except in this case there was no word at all. That can also render a movie DOA. Add to that the studio’s decision to quietly drop it into theaters on Super Bowl Weekend and you have a recipe for a movie destined to fail.
While definitely a January horror movie, Gretel & Hansel is a smidge better than recent duds like The Turning, Underwater and Dolittle (not technically a horror movie but scary nonetheless). It has an eerie atmosphere and moody cinematography that brings to mind the Italian giallo movies of the 60s and 70s. Think Mario Bava (Black Sunday) or Dario Argento (Deep Red). Robin Coudert’s synth-heavy score echoes the work of Goblin (1978’s Dawn of the Dead). Sadly, none of this compensates for the lack of storyline and periods of inactivity. It’s dull, plodding and overly simplistic in meaning.
The name switcheroo in the title tells us in no uncertain way that Gretel & Hansel is a tale of female empowerment. In this take on the Grimm fairy tale, older sister Gretel (Lillis, the It movies) takes the lead. She’s the one taking care of much younger brother Hansel (Leakey) after their mentally ill mother sends them into the cruel world to fend for themselves with this advice: “Dig yourself some pretty little graves.” After spending the night at the home of a kindly woodsman (Babalola, TV’s Bancroft), they journey deeper into the woods until they come across a house belonging to Holda (Krige, Thor: The Dark World), a strange old lady with some terrifying secrets, one of which explains the bounty of food and sweets always on her table.
After a promising start in which the siblings experiment with hallucinogenic mushrooms, Gretel & Hansel hits a wall and never recovers. Once the kids meet the old lady, nothing all that interesting happens. Obvious, yes; interesting, no. We get to witness Gretel’s transition from girl to woman by way of symbols that aren’t exactly subtle- e.g. a long wooden staff and a vat of viscous goo. Gee, what could they possibly mean? Because this Gretel is older than other incarnations, there’s a sexual element to certain scenes; most notably, the one where a prospective employer asks if her womanhood is still intact. The old pervert wants more than a housekeeper. While I admire director Oz Perkins (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) for putting a different spin on the story, it simply doesn’t work. The screenplay by Rob Hayes fails to develop a story that’s truly scary. Unsettling imagery and atmosphere will only take a movie so far. After a while, the whole thing becomes quite tedious.
With her roles in the It movies and the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects, Lillis has proven worthy of the title “One to Watch”. She’s a young actress who’s going places. Under other circumstances, I would say she’s the lone bright spot of Gretel & Hansel, but nothing in the movie is bright. She’s as gloomy as her surroundings. She also gets saddled with some really lame dialogue especially in the voiceover that explains things better left unexplained. It’s entirely unnecessary and feels like a last-minute studio decision. Lillis has spunk, but you wouldn’t know it from watching Gretel & Hansel. Like the other characters, she appears to exist in a weird reality where everybody acts like a drugged mental patient. You know it’s bad when you can’t even describe the villain as campy. It would have been cool if Krige brought some of that to her character, but she doesn’t.
At a mere 87 minutes, Gretel & Hansel still drags. Time stands still when nothing is going on; it’s a rule that applies to both real life and reel life. I was really hoping it would drag me out of the winter doldrums, but it didn’t. If anything, it made them worse. It’s too bad. The month started off strong with The Grudge, but has consistently disappointed since. Gretel & Hansel is just one more movie to throw on the January scrap heap. It’ll be forgotten by the time spring rolls around.
