Harefooted Halloween: Gretel & Hansel

What I Liked: The production design (Jeremy Red (Hard Candy)) and cinematography (Galo Olivares (camera operator on Roma)) are absolutely beautiful.  Lots of pale yellows and neon blues give a rosy yet grimy feel.  It’s not overly kaleidoscopic though which was a good decision for such gloomy, no wait…grim subject matter (see what I did there?).  And it’s very nice that there’s no terrible shaky cam to distract you either.  All the shots are clear and wonderfully composed.  There’s so much awesome eerie imagery to soak up and spooky atmosphere to get caught up in.

Alice Krige’s (Deadwood) performance as the witch is magnificent.  She rides the line of acting kind and charitable towards Hansel (Samuel Leakey (Twist)) and Gretel (Sophia Lillis (It (2017))) while at the same time emitting a serious creep factor.  Krige never lashes out and keeps it reserved the whole way which adds a sense of uneasiness to even the most humdrum scenes.

What I Didn’t Like: In general the script is kinda bad.  One of the problems is they had to stretch a relatively brief story into feature length and that mainly resulted in the witch having to keep up her ruse for an extended period.  I know she wants to fatten up the kids before she cooks them but the movie drags a bit towards the middle.  But before Hansel and Gretel even get to the witch there’s an odd scene where they run into a weirdo who tries to kill them.  He looks like a zombie or maybe he’s just sick or I dunno.  That felt totally out of place.  The rest of the issues are more routine type stuff like poor dialogue, unnecessary narration, story elements introduced only to serve the finale, messy backstories, etc.

Overall Impressions: If you think about it this is pretty much an impossible film to make.  The baseline story you’re working off is about a cannibalistic child murderer and then on top of that you wanna do a dark horror version.  I don’t know if anyone really wants to see that.  The concept is just too unpleasant for most folks to get behind.  I mean either you go all in with something deeply disturbing that’ll be extremely alienating or you pull back and play up the fantasy elements without putting the children in too much danger.  They chose the latter.  It’s your only option for a mainstream release.

Oz Perkins wrote and directed and has been transitioning more into those roles the past few years after starting out as an actor (Psycho II).  He also did The Blackcoat’s Daughter which is another methodical psychologically driven horror picture and I liked that better but Perkins shows a lot pf promise.  He seems to be trying to find different angles on horror instead of doing straight forward pieces.  We always need filmmakers like him to shake shit up so I’m interested in what he does in the future.

As for Gretel & Hansel it’s a tough recommendation.  There are awesome visuals and a cool performance by Krige but unfortunately it’s underwhelming in all other areas.