2024
If you’re expecting a straightforward retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Osgood Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel might throw you for a loop. This stylized dark fantasy shifts the focus squarely onto Gretel (Sophia Lillis with her hair of January fire muted with mist and grime), reimagining her as the elder sibling. The film’s dialogue is fascinatingly bizarre – theatrically, almost poetically olde-timey one moment, then strangely modern the next, creating an abstract cadence that somehow works perfectly with the film’s otherworldly rhythm, like a dark bedtime story being whispered in an ancient tongue.
All of this is heightened by Robin Coudert’s haunting and hypnotic electronic soundscape, which thrums beneath every scene like some half-remembered nightmare. And like any good fever dream, not everything here needs to make sense: their mother goes from desperate to axe-wielding lunatic in record time, a surprisingly chill huntsman casually deals with a random zombie, and Gretel’s fierce protectiveness of her brother somehow culminates in sending him off alone into the world.
The film follows our young protagonists as they’re forced from their home into a wilderness that feels pulled straight from a Tin Can Forest piece – all fog-saturated colors and deep folkloric shadows, where every twisted path seems to lead somewhere ancient and strange. When they stumble upon a geometric black house that practically hums with sinister energy, they meet Holda (Alice Krige), a witch who serves up her poison with precise, deliberate care.
Krige is absolutely magnificent here – her performance a masterclass in controlled menace, each smile a calculated display of power. The flashbacks to young Holda are weirdly jarring, though – she looks like someone wandered off a 2019 Instagram witch aesthetic page and into medieval Europe. As she begins to draw Gretel into her world of dark magic and forbidden feasts, the film transforms into a coming-of-age story about power and the price of survival.
I’m particularly taken with the film’s stunning visual language. Cinematographer Galo Olivares crafts frames that could be hung in a gallery – all symmetrical compositions and deep shadows. The witch’s modernist house seems to defy architectural logic, its sharp angles and triangular motifs suggesting something ancient and wrong beneath its clean geometry. Every frame feels purposeful, every shadow deliberate, creating a fairy tale that’s both beautiful and deeply unsettling.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with some of Perkins’ other work – The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House prove he’s an expert at crafting a spooky atmosphere. And now that I’m out of my old apartment horror phase, I think I might be diving into an Osgood Perkins binge. There’s something very recent of his that’s calling my name…
Day Twenty-Fourof 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
