Review: Gretel & Hansel Gives a Classic Fable a Lush and Moral Makeover

Beginning with the reversed names in its title, Osgood Perkins’s Gretel & Hansel announces itself as a distinctly feminine spin on the Grimm fairy tale. The film’s prologue tells of a young girl born not only with the power of second sight, but the ability and desire to compel people, even family members, to kill themselves. That tale is unsettling yet curiously disconnected from the familiar saga that follows, until we learn that Gretel (Sophia Lillis) is also gripped by similarly unsettling visions of strange beings in the forest surrounding her home. In one scene, she voices to her mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) that she often sees things as if she were dreaming when she’s awake.

The introduction of these supernatural elements is a risky gambit in the retelling of such a familiar tale. But the filmmakers seamlessly integrate Gretel’s increasing awareness of her unique capabilities with her burgeoning sexuality—with the help of what appears to be magic lube and a wooden staff, no less—and newfound role as the maternal figure to Hansel (Sammy Leakey) after their mother, driven psychotic from starvation, forever banishes them from their home. As the ravenous Gretel and Hansel trudge through the forest on their way to safety, after being provided guidance by a kindly hunter (Charles Babalola), Gretel’s visions become more all-encompassing, and what may or may not be dreams of children walking aimlessly like lemmings being led to slaughter begin to weigh heavily on the girl’s consciousness.

When the siblings, incapacitated by their hunger, arrive at the home of a strange but welcoming old woman, Holda (Alice Krige), who has them partake of a bountiful feast laid out across her kitchen table, Gretel comes face to face not only with a potential surrogate mother, but a mystical woman who helps her to tap into the heightened powers lying mostly dormant within her. Holda is a frightening presence, with her black-stained fingers and abilities to conjure one feast after another as if out of thin air. But it’s Gretel’s grappling with the changes she’s experiencing within herself, as well as with her evolving, and constricting, role of caretaker to Hansel, that becomes the film’s raison d’être.

Perkins’s patient, deliberate pacing, along with Galo Olivares’s gorgeously moody cinematography, creates a densely layered, richly atmospheric sense of place within which Gretel’s coming of age plays out. The forest is transformed into a landscape of impending doom, while Holda’s eerie, triangular-shaped home becomes a shape-shifting, kaleidoscopic space of hidden passageways and myriad pleasantries that serve as a distracting veneer to obscure the historic evils that have occurred, and continue to lurk, there.

Gretel’s intense hunger isn’t just for food, but for a sense of agency in the wake of her abandonment. When she begins to get a clearer sense of the grisly inner workings of Holda’s abode and of the dangers of the world at large, her journey becomes one that elides a clear-cut trajectory toward female empowerment in favor of a more nuanced moral interrogation than one would expect from an adaptation of the Grimm brothers’ cautionary fairy tale.

In the end, Gretel’s self-realization results not from simply embracing the full extent of her abilities, but from understanding how she can restrain and govern the manner in which she wields her immense power. In refusing to be subjugated into a traditionally maternal role or to violently rebel against her femininity, Gretel carves out a singular path for herself that won’t require her to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find her way home.