Gretel & Hansel (2020) by Osgood Perkins

Contains spoilers for The Witch and vague, mild spoilers for Gretel & Hansel.

Review by Andrew Swafford

There’s no breadcrumb trail in Gretel & Hansel. No gingerbread house, either. The menacing old woman at the dark heart of the story lives in a postmodernist isosceles art piece. Rather than being a one-dimensional cannibal, she’s a witch operating on her own lore – her magic powers evident in a pitch-black pigmentation bleeding down her fingers. All this is to say that Gretel & Hansel, the new grimdark fairy tale horror adaptation by Osgood Perkins, is weird.

The default tendency of fairy tale adaptations to follow familiar structures and recycle well-known tropes is both a gift and a curse – storytellers avoid straying from the path in order to keep their adaptations of classic stories recognizable, but hemming too closely to that path makes them predictable. The easily recitable fairy tale plotlines most people remember were codified by Charles Perrault (France, 1628-1703) and the Brothers Grimm (Germany, 1785-1863), but earlier Italian fairy tale collectors like Giovanni Straparola (1485-1558) and Giambattista Basile (1566-1632) told far more unpredictable stories – often to the point of incoherence. In Basile’s version of this story, “Ninnilo and Nennella” (1634), once both children are abandoned in the woods by their impoverished parents (as they are in all versions), the Gretel-equivalent character is then captured by pirates and raised as the captain’s daughter until the ship capsizes and she is swallowed by an enchanted fish – inside the belly of which she finds a castle where she raises herself as a princess before she is eventually reunited with her brother by way of a couple more nonsensical leaps. The familiar story about breadcrumbs and gingerbread houses and cannibalism has a far more visceral, primal logic to it.

Perkins’s Gretel & Hansel tells the scarier story inherited from Perrault and Grimm, but does so by way of a discursive structure more akin to Straparola and Basile, ultimately allowing the story to be weird again, which in turn makes each acute narrative turn difficult to see coming – an invaluable quality for a horror film. For the first 30 minutes or so of watching Gretel & Hansel, I felt a strange sense of peculiar tension; not only did I have no idea what I would see in the next scene, but I had no idea what I would see in the next shot. The imagery one is liable to see in any given shot heightens that tension.

Like the aforementioned breadcrumbs and gingerbread house, many elements of the “Hansel & Gretel” story are abandoned altogether and replaced by more macabre building blocks that nevertheless situate the film in a broader universe of fairy tale grotesquerie. The film appropriates elements of “Bluebeard” (a tiny door leading to a gory surprise), “Sleeping Beauty” (the trope of people being baked into pies is borrowed from Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia”), “Little Red Riding Hood” (a huntsman, wolf iconography, a warning not to stray from the path, and a tale-within-the-tale called “Little Pink Cap” in reference to Grimm’s “Little Red Cap”), and probably more that I didn’t catch. Rather than making for a cheap mash-up of winking references (a la Shrek or Into the Woods), Gretel & Hansel blends the base elements of familiar fairy tales into a witches’ brew of occult symbology – all of which is captured and lit with silent-era shadow puppetry and surreal day-for-night color correction.

Gretel & Hansel is thematically steeped in a sense of history, too, as it concerns itself with a lot of the same ideas as its forebearers: parents betraying their children out of impoverished desperation, gifts never being truly free, and the universe being ordered by magical karmic justice. How Perkins builds on this ancestry, however, is his focus on the gendered nature of these issues – especially poverty. Here it should be noted that gender and class inequality is something that the fairy tales of old tend to either treat as perfectly natural or explicitly encourage. As the scholar Jack Zipes argues in his book Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, the literary fairy tales penned by Perrault and Grimm, despite being borrowed from the oral tales of the peasantry, were intentionally designed to normalize and naturalize the patriarchal family structures of the bourgeoisie. It worked.

“As French society became more regulated and efforts were made to bring about a homogenous state, the pressures placed on children to conform to role models became more severe. In keeping with rigid social standards that denounce open forms of sexual behavior, table manners, dress, and natural functioning as ‘barbaric’ and ‘uncivilized – that is, ways that had been commonly accepted by the upper classes prior to the sixteenth century – it became important to cultivate feelings of shame and to arouse anxiety in children when they did not conform to a more inhibiting way of social conduct…Here the crucial factor to consider is the social standard to which all French [fairy tale] writers subscribed: the literary fairy tale was to be used as a vehicle to discuss proper breeding and behavior exemplified by models drawn from the practice in court society and bourgeois circles” (Zipes 37, 46).

The clearest encapsulation of this idea is the way in which Red Riding Hood’s warning to not stray from the path is directly connected to the importance of young girls clinging to their virginity in Perrault’s moral. The one detail Perrault neglects to mention in his moralizing, of course, is the monetary value of a girl’s chastity in a social system that used maidens as bargaining chips in monetary exchange. Considering the latent sexism/classism of these tales, it has been and continues to be the task of later adaptations to challenge their “classic” prescriptions.

Gretel & Hansel makes for an interesting case study in how to do this: because women have historically bore the brunt of the financial desperation contained within the “Hansel and Gretel” tale, it makes sense that Gretel would be shifted to be the point of view character, as the inverted title suggests (and as she should have been all along – she’s the character with the greatest sense of agency in the Grimm tale). Her position in society is emphasized here by both the screenplay and the performance of Sophia Lillis, who came onto my radar by giving the most compelling performance of Andrés Muschietti’s It. Not only does Lillis carry the entire film, but she also nonverbally communicates its point of view with her prickly and skeptical facial expressions as she navigates the various negotiations she’s forced to undergo as a woman in a historically prefeminist fairy tale landscape. An early scene in which she stares in tired resentment at a man offering her food and shelter in exchange for her virginity puts a much finer point on a gender dynamic present in many literary fairy tales like “Bluebeard” and “Beauty and the Beast,” in which women go along with similar transactions with a greater sense of assumed amicability.

Although the Brothers Grimm eventually made Gretel the hero of their tale, they also gendered the malevolent forces of the story in a sinister way: it is the wife who proposes abandoning the children (as opposed to the husband in Perrault’s story), and it is a hag who tries to cannibalize the children (as opposed to a male ogre who has a kind wife in the Perrault). Here, the hag has been converted to a witch – in the revolutionary sense of the term – who is aware of and combative towards the systemic sexism of Gretel’s world. Just like Robert Eggers’s 2016 horror film The Witch, Perkins’s film positions witchcraft as an alternative to systemic sexism, picking up where that film left off in imagining witchcraft as the lesser of two bad options for women in a prefeminist landscape. (In other words, the most clearly stated moral of The Witch reads something like: if you had the choice between being sold off to an older man by your father or worshiping the devil, you’d choose Satan every time.) While Eggers’s film is certainly the more powerful and well-crafted film of the two, Gretel & Hansel strongly feels like a post-Witch movie in the way it questions and complicates the solution offered by the devilish Black Phillip at the end of that film. Here, Gretel is not unattached, as Thomasin is after her entire family is consumed by their own paranoia; Gretel still has Hansel to take care of, and neither his precociousness nor his maleness are good enough reasons to eat him alive in favor of the scorched-earth, obstensibly feminist lifestyle offered by witchcraft. In Gretel & Hansel, witchcraft is both a way of empowering women and also a destructive force that can harm a woman’s own loved ones, male or female, if wielded merely to essentialize, eviscerate, and excommunicate.

In making this comparison between the two films, it’s important to consider their differing contexts. Although The Witch does contain fairy tale elements (it’s subtitled “A New England Folktale,” includes a well-deployed allusion to “Little Red Riding Hood,” and it of course involves witchcraft), it is ultimately a movie set within history: the Puritan American settlements of the 1630s, to be exact. However, despite the fact that Gretel & Hansel takes cues from the historical time periods in which these tales were written (depicting marriage as the transaction of sex/babies for food/shelter, for example), it is first and foremost a fairy tale. Unlike The Witch, it is unstuck in time. (The language of each film reflects this, too: the characters in The Witch talk like people out of the 1630s; the characters in Gretel & Hansel talk like people out of a storybook.) This context changes how we are to engage with their messaging: The Witch, as a fabulist historical drama, illuminates something about the lives of women in a specific historical moment; Gretel & Hansel, as a fairy tale, presents a universal moral prescription on how to live. In other words, The Witch suggests that smashing up babies and bathing in their blood (metaphorically speaking) might be understandable given a certain historical context; Gretel & Hansel suggests that on a more universal level, this level of viciousness solves nothing.

This is the type of narrative richness that can really only be achieved by a storyteller who is engaging with the history of what they’re adapting. Disney Studios – the foremost purveyor of fairy stories in our era – does not do this, instead opting only to sand down and whitewash new versions of their already sanded-down and whitewashed stories for a reliable return on investment. Gretel & Hansel, on the other hand, is a gnarly piece of fairy tale storytelling with images worth recoiling from and ideas worth chewing on.