Gretel & Hansel

This story will sound familiar: Siblings Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and Hansel (Samuel J. Leakey) have been forced to leave their childhood home and wander the dark forest in a desperate search for food and shelter. There they come across a house where an old, kind lady (Alice Krige) lives. She takes the two children in and gives them delicious treats to eat. But while Hansel feels like he's in paradise, Gretel begins to doubt just that. Mysterious noises and apparitions in the house make the girl suspect that something abysmal evil lurks behind the friendly facade of the house and its inhabitant.

Director Oz Perkins has turned the well-known Grimm Brothers fairy tale into a dark mystery horror film with Gretel & Hansel, which can definitely be said to have an atmosphere all its own. Artful images of demonic terror draw the viewer in more than once here. There's something fascinating about watching Gretel - played by Sophie Lillis, known from It and the Netflix series I Am Not Okay With This - being driven more and more towards madness by strange apparitions. This is especially effective when Perkins goes for subtlety.

The aspect surrounding the witch's history is also quite interesting due to Perkins` reinterpretation. This, even in conjunction with the finale, could have been really good. But unfortunately, Perkins keeps getting in his own way with the effort to direct a horror film that is as artistically valuable as possible. The imagery is great, but dramaturgically, exhausting tedium too often dominates the proceedings. Perkins relies too much on the admittedly successful atmosphere that his images build, but forgets to connect them to a story that carries the film over its rather short running time.

And this is exactly where the problem lies. At just 87 minutes, Gretel & Hansel still feels far too long. Had Oz Perkins, in addition to the artistic aspect of his production, also tweaked the entertainment value a bit, which could have been enhanced by a little more tempo and a little less meaning-laden symbolism, his adaptation of the fairy tale might well have had the makings of a minor genre classic. Because the approaches that Perkins follows here are really good. Only in the execution, unfortunately, some things went wrong, so that in the end it is only enough for a with cutbacks worth seeing.

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp