Gretel & Hansel (2020)

Osgood Perkins offers us a fairy tale drained of whimsy and refilled with dread, which is a respectable artistic choice and an unremarkable political one. The film reorders its title to "Gretel & Hansel" and hands the story to the elder sibling, a sixteen-year-old girl learning that power can be hers if she stops scrubbing floors for men who ask impertinent questions about her virginity. This is a genuine re-centering of a familiar tale, and the New York Times said so, so we can all agree it happened. It is a coming-of-age story about a young woman, which is not nothing. It is also not a movement.

The dark wood is full of atmosphere and very little else. The witch is a witch, the children are hungry, and the poverty that drives them into the trees is a plot device older than the Brothers Grimm themselves. No one here is dismantling a system. The horror is personal, the evil is supernatural, and the film's only sermon is a refrain about trusting the darkness, delivered with the confidence of a fortune cookie. A huntsman of African descent appears, helps the children, and exits, which satisfies the casting ledger without disturbing the story's European bones. The bodies on screen are emaciated, burned, and eaten. This is not a film with a wellness message.

What remains is a mood piece, slow and lovely and occasionally tedious, the kind of movie a person watches with admiration and then forgets by spring. It has progressive gestures, gently applied. It has no agenda to speak of, which in this climate feels almost quaint. I respect its restraint. I also checked my watch.