“Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?” -- Kenneth Patchen.
Many horror movies take place in what I call "Horror Movie Land", which is some non-specific time in the past, usually in middle or eastern Europe but sometimes in France or the UK or even early America. The time period can vary from the late middle ages all the way up to the early 20th Century (the automobile in Hammer's Kiss of the Vampire is a giveaway, for one example). What they have in common is that these settings are nowhere real. They are, rather, archetypal landscapes, the land of dreams and nightmares conjured up by the Gothic imagination of the Romantics. Think of the bleak landscapes painted by artists like Caspar David Friedrich or Otto Runge, or the Europe of Melmoth the Wanderer or The Castle of Otranto. Almost all horror movies that are set in Horror Movie Land abstract their settings for effect. There's a level of theatricality in all such movies, whether they're shot on a soundstage, as Corman's Poe movies were, or in the landscapes favored by Hammer and Amicus. Osgood Perkins's new film, Gretel & Hansel is set in a more abstract version of Horror Movie Land than usual. The locale is doggedly non-specific (the Hansel and Gretel story is German, but this film doesn't seem particularly Germanic), and the time period seems to exist outside of a historical context. Given the film's origins in a fairy tale, it's entirely appropriate that it exists inside an archetype rather than in a specific time and space. It makes for a strange mood.
As with Perkins's previous horror movies, this is a female-centric film in which the principal conflict is between Gretel--here a wise sixteen-year old--and Holda, the witch in the woods. Hansel is eight and acts as the object of their conflict. Gretel and Hansel have been turned out of their homes by their insane mother after Gretel fails to secure employment in the house of a noble. She's hip enough to the ways of the world to realized that the rich landowner isn't really in the market for a maid. The land around Gretel's family is accursed, and famine is ravaging that land. As Gretel and Hansel leave their home, their mother suggests that they dig their own little graves, and maybe one for her, too. Along their way, they are aided by a kind huntsman who maps the woods for them and urges them to find the foresters, who he suggests might take them in, but warns them not to stray from the path. The forest itself only offers them hunger and isolation and dire visions at the limits of their perceptions, certainly not helped by the sinister mushrooms they eat when they have nothing else. Eventually, they come upon a house where the table has been set with abundance. They are taken in by Holda, the owner of the house, but they cannot determine from where her bounty comes or why it keeps so well ("plums only last three days out of season," Gretel observes). Holda recognizes in Gretel something of herself and begins to teach Gretel her craft: herbalism and darker things. Gretel discovers the secrets of Holda's powers in due time, and Holda, for herself, guides Gretel to her own power, provided she gives up the part of her that is holding her back. That part of her is Hansel...
Oz Perkins is a director of so-called "quiet horror." Both of his previous films, The Blackcoat's Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House, prefer to insinuate their horrors and creep away with atmosphere rather than shock the audience with blood and thunder scares. Neither of those films had enough plot to sustain that technique. Often, they seemed glum and tedious rather than creepy. Not so this new film. The plot here hangs on a story that has an atavistic hold on Western cultural memory, and that does a lot of the heavy lifting. Perkins still indulges in mood rather than story, but here it manages to work. There's something about watching children lost in the woods that tickles something in the hindbrain. The mood of the film most resembles the mood of The Blair Witch Project, though without the headache-inducing cinematography. Many of its initial terrors are sounds off in the trees or are simply the oppressive, autumnal landscape. The styling of its human habitations seems a-cultural and could exist anywhere. There's a distinctly modernist sensibility to some of the architecture in this film, particularly Holda's A-frame house and the underground abattoir beneath it. Holda's abattoir reminds me a bit of the dreamy space where the anti-heroine of Under the Skin took her victims, and Gretel & Hansel indulges in some overtly similar imagery. This is all built on the bones of mythologies that still resonate in our cultural meme pool. Even though Perkins's first two films are more overtly "realistic" (whatever that may mean), this one has more of a narrative hook in its first ten minutes than either of those films ever found during their entire running times.
Perkins is a good director of actors, though he's been fortunate in his leading ladies so far. This film is basically a two-hander that needs to be carried by its leads. Sophia Lillis is up to the task of playing Gretel, and it's to her immense credit that she's not blown of the the screen by Alice Krige's Holda. Krige offers a delicious melange of menace, kindness, and manipulation. She's good as the witch. You get her full story and you can see Krige internalize all of it and offer it back to the audience in her face and posture throughout. Lillis, for her part, does the same, though the range of emotions that the filmmakers ask of her is more limited. A great deal of this film is a series of conversations between these women, some of them in a teacher/student mode, some of them wary verbal fencing, some of them a lethal chess match (chess is an overt image in the film). Both actors are game for it and it's fun to watch them play against each other. Young Samuel Leaky is a fine Hansel, and he doesn't strike any obvious false notes, but he's almost an afterthought in the film's drama. He's mainly a prize that the two women trade for advantages.
The central conflict that drives the narrative is a question of from where women derive their power. Do they derive their power from their children (something implied by the fairy tale of the Beautiful Child that opens the film)? Do they derive their power from their sexuality? Do they derive their power from their own agency (and does the world take that agency away from them)? Gretel's interview with the landowner is a signpost toward the film's main concerns: men are only concerned with her suitability for sex. When he asks her whether her maidenhead is still "intact," its clear to her that nothing she can do is of greater value than her fuckability. She rejects this out of hand. Even Holda's power seems to derive from her sexuality, and so too, does Gretel's. The persistent shots of the moon in different phases is a telltale, and if you miss this allusion, the film accompanies one of Gretel's prophetic dreams with her menses. (Add this to the list of menstrual horror movies). The Huntsman tells Gretel that she should study herb and medicine if she is to retain her agency in the world, and that's initially what Holda offers her, too, but she's unwilling to sacrifice family ties for the access to Holda's power. And yet, at the end of the film, it's implied that her rejection of conventional norms will make of her a witch whether she wants that or not. The very last scene can be read as either defeat or liberation, depending on one's point of view. The film maybe gives away the game in its voice over narration, but the words on the soundtrack don't match the implications of the image. If one regards the images on offer during the closing credits as a continuation of the text of the film--which is something one can argue-- then the film ends on a disquieting note indeed.
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