The director Osgood Perkins specializes in not-quite-horror movies: eerie, patient, female-centric tales that hint at far more than they reveal. In “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” (2016), he teased a standard haunting into a conversation between life and death. And with the more bloody “Blackcoat’s Daughter” (released in the U.S. in 2017), he used shifting timelines and an isolated girls’ boarding school to examine grief and abandonment.
“Gretel & Hansel” finds him relying once again on atmosphere over narrative. Flipping the title of the well-known fairy tale, he sends the two siblings (confidently played by Sophia Lillis and Sammy Leakey) into the deep, dark woods. Famine and disease have ravaged the countryside, and the children’s distraught mother, unable to feed them, has cast them out to fend for themselves. A friendly hunter (Charles Babalola) warns them not to talk to wolves, however seductive; but it’s their human counterparts who are more to be feared.
“Are you intact?,” a leering nobleman asks the teenage Gretel in response to her pleas for a housekeeper position. And when, starving, the two are enticed into the suspiciously food-filled cottage of an old crone (an unsettling Alice Krige), the vile secret behind her abundant vittles might put you off your own.
Essentially the story of a young woman coming into her power, “Gretel & Hansel” is quietly sinister, yet too underdeveloped to truly scare. Together, Jeremy Reed’s production design and Galo Olivares’s photography weave a chilly spell that’s regrettably undermined by the opacity of the storytelling. Like our two babes in the wood, the movie needs a bit more meat on its bones.
Gretel & Hansel
Rated PG-13 for bloody offal and sickening sweets. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
