Gretel & Hansel (2020)
“It also smells of bacon, you know?”
That is a great set up for a line like “And so does this movie…except that people like bacon,” but that is too harsh. Gretel & Hansel isn’t a bad movie - it’s just not particularly good and nowhere near as creepy, scary, or suspenseful as the trailers for it. It’s just kind of there.
So what’s this flick about?
None of this is a Spoiler if you read the Brothers Grimm story as a kid: A brother and sister are lost in the forest, they come across an improbable house in the middle of nowhere, a strange old lady fattens them up, and attempted cannibalism follows. The movie adds color to that and a modern, if dark, sensibility, with an overlay of feminist empowerment, but that’s pretty much it.
Is the Gingerbread Cake real?
The cake is not a total lie - there are some good things in this film. Sophia Lillis, who played a young Camille in the much creepier Sharp Objects, has good chops as Gretel, Samuel Leakey is more than tolerable as Hansel and has a few good lines, Alice Krige and Jessica De Gouw ( the 2013-14 Dracula series) are good as the bad witch, and Charles Babalola is a teriffic Huntsman (despite only getting 2 minutes on screen). So yeah, the acting is pretty good.
And the camera work is not bad, although the darkness of the scenes tends to detract from the storytelling rather than making things creepier.
But again, none of the good is particularly impressive. It is just ok.
Perhaps the best things I can say about the films are things the director and writer were not planning to be selling points.
First, it is short at just under 90 minutes. You can watch this, eat some popcorn, read the latest Big Movie Blog review, watch another movie, and still have a little of your night left.
The other thing is that it is not particularly spooky and there isn’t a lot of explicit violence - just a lot of talk about how delicious Hansel looks. It is, truth be told, a lot tamer than the original version of the children’s fairy tale.
With that in mind, if I had some younger teens or mature tweens who wanted a scare (the movie is PG-13), this is a pretty safe movie to put in front of them. It won’t make them jump, it will probably creep them out a little, and most won’t be traumatized the next time they see a gingerbread man.
You can catch Gretel & Hansel HERE.
Two out of Five Bacon Scented Cookies.
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Still have a taste for gingerbread? You may want to nibble on one of these.
