Gretel & Hansel (2020)

Gretel & Hansel (2020)

2020 PG-13 87 Minutes

Horror | Fantasy | Thriller

A long time ago in a distant fairy tale countryside, a young girl leads her little brother into a dark wood in desperate search of food and work, only to stumble upon a nexus of terrifying evil.

Overall Rating

5 / 10
Verdict: So-So

User Review

  • d_riptide

    d_riptide

    5 / 10
    People are going to view “Gretel & Hansel” as either one of four things: an impressive feat of lush stylization, a lesser man’s version of an A24 movie, a dose of cinematic NyQuil or all of the above. Me personally, it’s a beautiful portrait that has a stunning presentation but lacks any nuance or importance to become anything close to what it’s trying to be. It tries it’s absolute damndest to replicate the style of Roger Eggers or Ari Aster for that matter and upon spending so much time building and setting up a wickedly sinister, crept ominous atmosphere with stellar cinematography and sound design, and somewhat succeeding, there’s still underdeveloped characters, leisurely and rather annoying pacing, rather distracting green screen effects with the aspect ratio and scene references faltering with little to no story progression wandering around and even if you’re able to live with that, I guarantee a good half of the audience is going to fall asleep about 20 minutes in because this movie demands A LOT OF PATIENCE for just a 90 minute flick. Just like Gemini Man and 1/2 of The Goldfinch, the film focuses too heavily on a gimmick to sell a movie that everything else suffers as a result.

    It is legitimate style over substance running rampant throughout the entire movie and it never really seemed to evolve into much more beyond that. The film never delved into a huge waste of time though (at least to me) but the subsequent lack of character development amongst all the dark, gothic inspired pizzazz almost forced me to check out. I CAN recommend this to somebody looking for a genuine thriller flick to help freak them out and such but that’s only if you don’t have a short attention span.

    It ain’t saying much.