Following from my reconsideration of Midsommar last week, I got to thinking that fairytales, when you get right down to them, are dark and unsettling. They’re supposed to be, because they’re morality tales, ways to teach the young survival skills and cultural mores. They communicate to children that these are the stakes of straying from the straight and narrow, relics from a time when carelessness could easily get you killed. Over the generations their teeth have been lost, but if you look at what actually happens in these stories, holy shit. Every now and then you’ll see what’s supposed to be a horror “reimagining” of a fairy tale, but these are usually just gimmicky riffs on the slasher film. Nothing to write home about.
Gretel And Hansel, on the other hand, is an atmospheric and spooky reimagining of the classic fairytale, less a straight retelling of the story than an opportunity to explore it and the ideas around it, around what a world like theirs would be like, what witches are, and what it means to have (or be in) a story. It stumbles at points, but there’s a lot here to appreciate.
The film opens with the story of a little girl in a pink cap, and the bargain with darkness that her parents struck to save her life. It worked, and their only child did not die, but she was…changed…by the experience. She could bend others’ will to hers, to horrifying effect. And so her mother - now a widow - abandoned her to her fate, casting her out of the village and deep into the forest.
But that was a long time ago, and here and now we are concerned with Gretel, her brother Hansel in tow. It’s just the two of them and their mother, since their father has gone to his reward. She’s gone to the master of an inn to ask for work. She can bake, and launder. But the inn’s master in more interested in whether or not she’s kept her maidenhood. Gretel walks away, realizing she isn’t wanted for honest work, and Hansel asks her why she couldn’t have been more agreeable - he’s very hungry, and there could have been food there. Their mother is equally unsympathetic - poverty, disease, and traumatic grief have made her utterly incapable of taking care of them, and she entreats Gretel to dig their graves instead.
So there is no home for Gretel and Hansel anymore, they have been abandoned to their fate as well. They can do nothing but trek into the woods and hope to find shelter. And after some misadventure, they make their way to a lone cabin in the middle of the forest. There’s a warm light in the windows, and the table is laden with food. An old woman lives there. It seems like she’s been there awhile.
As if she moved deep into the forest a long time ago.
If you’re at all familiar with the fairytale, you’ve got a pretty good idea of how this story goes, but what makes this film interesting (besides its skillful execution) is the spin it puts on that story, how it recontextualizes it and uses it as a platform to think about the importance of self-definition and self-determination. First, it takes place in a very grounded world, one where pestilence and war has devastated the population, and everyone exists on the knife-edge of survival. Starvation and decay hang over the land like a miasma, and there’s little hope or mercy to be found. Gretel and Hansel are children, vulnerable, in a world where there are plenty of people prepared to take advantage. This film recasts Gretel as being older than Hansel, so she has to shoulder a lot of responsibility at what is still a very young age. There’s some resentment there because Hansel is, well, an impulsive little boy. This causes problems because he doesn’t have Gretel’s caution or restraint. He has little sense of danger, only his own desire to prove how brave and strong he is. The first part of the movie, then, almost plays like a 19th-century version of
The Road as they fight hunger and exhaustion in their search for safety.
Once they arrive at the old woman’s house, the film then does a lot of work around the different conceptions of witches. We have the little girl in the pink cap who is inherently evil (described in what is essentially a fairytale-within-a-fairytale), born of a bargain with darkness. But we also have the crone, the old woman who keeps herself to herself, who is wise in the ways of herbs and nature. It’s a depiction of witchcraft with which we’re familiar, albeit not in the context of this story. The film even cheekily nods to
The Wizard Of Oz in a couple of places as well, and both the caricatured black-clad, pointy-hatted evocation of witchcraft as well as something closer to the sorceress, a powerful ritual magician. So it’s never as simple as “lure kids in with candy and throw them in the oven.” There’s a lot of other things going on. The crone who takes them in sees something in Gretel, and sees Hansel as burdening her, weighing her down. The story is less “mwhahahaha I am going to eat you,” and more “as long as your little brother is around, you’re not going to be able to grow into your own person because you feel obligated to take care of him.” The crone is almost more of a mentor to Gretel than anything else, and shows Gretel that she is powerful, and begins to teach her how to harness that power and use it to forge her own path, free of the expectations of others. It’s rooted in the original text, but uses it as a springboard to larger ideas.
Which is not to say that there isn’t something very dark going on here, because there is. The crone doesn’t keep animals, does not raise crops, and yet there is always food. And as Gretel points out, nothing is given without a price. It’s beautifully, beautifully shot, with lots of brooding, windswept forest panoramas and dim, firelit interiors, spikily punctuated with plenty of striking nightmare sequences and inventive compositional and editing choices. The dialogue is a mixture of archaic and modern, mostly period-appropriate with the occasional anachronistic phrase thrown in, and the soundtrack is mostly dominated by synthesizer, which adds to the out-of-time quality while complementing the overall mood nicely. This creates the same sense of dreamy timelessness as the director’s other films -
The Blackcoat’s Daughter and
I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House - but here it lands better in some spots than others, and it shares the latter film’s tendency toward pontification, to its detriment, especially in the final act, which tips a little too much in favor of windy monologues at a point when what it really needs is faster pacing and more intensity. It never really builds to the crescendo that it should, and it loses a bit of steam in the last act. It’s vividly realized, but there’s a bit of coldness to it, some distance.
Even if the denouement isn’t as cathartically scary as I wanted it to be (to its credit, it also never relies on jump scares - this is a film that, when it does do creepy, it does it very deliberately and very well), it invokes the idea of our personal “stories” to interesting effect - these people are literally in a story, a story in which other stories play a role, but the course of our lives is also sometimes called “our story,” so it’s as much about Gretel and Hansel’s right (and obligation) to find their own way, to become who they are meant to be, free of the hindrance of others, no matter how well-intentioned, as anything else. Which is a hell of a note for a fairytale. Pretty much a modern morality tale right there, a way to teach the young our values now, as much as ever.
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