Director: Oz Perkins (as Osgood Perkins)
Notable Cast: Sophia Lillis, Alice Krige, Sammy Leakey, Jessica
De Gouw, Charles Babalola
To set up this review of Gretel & Hansel, it’s
necessary to set the scene by touching on director Osgood Perkins. When he came
onto the scene, he did it in a bit of a sneaky way. His debut was The
Blackcoat’s Daughter (released originally under the title February) but
that was a film that took two years to eventually find its way to a mass
audience. In the meantime, he directed a film that went straight to Netflix, titled
I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House, and both films were met
with relatively mixed reactions from horror fanatics and more casual film fans.
If you want to read my reviews for them please feel free to read them HERE, but
to recap – I fuckin’ love them. The slow-burn approach, the suffocating
atmosphere, and the intentionality of all of the subtlety plays right into my sweet
spots.
This now leads us to the subject of this piece, Gretel &
Hansel. Going into the film, there was a sense that Orion Pictures might
make Perkins sacrifice his style for the sake of a more mainstream film, but –
much to my own delight – this is not the case. Maybe it’s because Orion is
trying to make their stake as a genre company, but Gretel & Hansel still
features all of the long, meandering narratives and slow pacing that one would
expect from a Perkins film. Granted, this was a controversial style that fed
into the mixed reactions for both of his first films, but Gretel & Hansel
is Perkins understanding how to make his style a bit more consumable while
still rightly fitting into his auteur stamp. If anything, a part of me wanted
it to be even more subtle, perhaps nixing the voice-over narrative by Gretel
that works to bridge over the various set pieces, but the choices for a slightly more user-friendly product are understandable even if the film is still
hardly mainstream.