GRIM TAKE ON A GRIMM TALE
Flipping Hansel & Gretel turns out to be nothing more than dumber & dumb
Foremost and first, congratulations to director Oz Perkins for overturning what had previously been an irreversible binomial with his new film Gretel & Hansel.
I can now look forward to such remakes as Furious & Fast, The Chocolate Factory & Willy Wonka, Louise & Thelma, Guy Ritchie’s Rollnrocka, and of course The Two Dwarfs & Snow White & the Other Five Dwarfs. But seriously, this flipped title is just Dumber & Dumb.
Alas, those first three words are just the start of the film’s
problems. After a long voice-over prologue — for a while I thought the entire movie was just going to be someone reading to me from the Grimm Brothers — the action turns to Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and her younger brother Hansel (Samuel Leakey), whose mother sends them out into the world to fend for themselves. What unusual and cruel punishment!
Far from being fancy free and footloose, the children are terrified, so much so that they can’t even keep their accents straight: Little Hansel’s is British, while hers is American. Are these two even kin and kith?
Anyway, after an encounter with a ghoul and a friendly knight (Charles Babalola, there and gone), the siblings encounter a sweet-smelling, oddly triangular cottage in the woods. A bit of entering and breaking reveals that the interior is stocked with all manner of drink and food, not to mention soft bunks: It’s a regular breakfast & bed!
The cottage is also home to a creepy old crone played by Alice Krige, whose career includes a turn as the Borg queen in Star Trek: First Contact. With her pointy black hat and self-aware broomstick, she’s a bit of a giveaway, but she’s kind enough in the early going, even if her language is a little off. “Another one bites the dust,” she says upon breaking a glass.
Horror is Perkins’ butter and bread — his other directing credits are the mystery-thrillers February, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and the upcoming A Head Full of Ghosts — and he got his start in the business, age 9, playing young Norman Bates in Psycho II.
Yes, he’s Anthony Perkins’ son. Later or sooner he was bound to blunder into these deep and dark woods.
Yet the real oddity about Gretel & Hansel is its truly aimless plot. An early meeting with an unsavoury potential employer goes nowhere; ditto the aforementioned knight; and a scene in which the children eat the wrong mushrooms and end up disorderly and drunk. These bits seem to have been included to push the running time to a more respectable 87 minutes. Not sweet, but short.
Sitting through this dull tale actually made me yearn for the noisily ludicrous Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters with Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton from 2013, part of the revisionist period that gave us Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. By contrast, there’s no winking or cleverness in this movie, merely low-grade scares along the way to a tidy and neat ending.
Perkins has been in the game long enough that Gretel & Hansel is unlikely to break or make his career.
And perhaps A Head Full of Ghosts, based on a much newer story (a 2015 novel by Paul G. Tremblay) will prove his redemption. Learn and live, I say.