Freaky fairy tale

Hansel & Gretel is a disturbing,
dream-like fantasy

LINGERING EERINESS: Hansel & Gretel

by MARK SLUTSKY

Call it a symptom of arrested development-inspired escapism or some sort of cultural return of the repressed, but the grown-up fairy tale is a popular genre these days. (The success of Guillermo del Toro and his Pan’s Labyrinth probably has something to do with it too.) It’s an effective combination. Juxtaposing childhood fantasy with grim psychological reality produces a strong, frequently disturbing effect, although sometimes I feel that the psychological traumas mined in these flamboyant genre pictures are a bit too easy—who isn’t going to be affected by scenes where children are abused or otherwise psychologically scarred?

Korean director Pil-Sung Yim’s Hansel & Gretel, which gets a release in theatres this week thanks to cool new local distributor Evokative Films, is firmly planted in the genre. The title is obviously a giveaway, and Yim plays with the old story in some interesting and surprising ways, flipping the story on its head and then back again (to go into further detail would spoil the film).

The movie starts with a young man named Eun-Soo (Jeong-myeong Cheon) crashing his car somewhere in the middle of the forest. When he comes to, it’s the middle of the night, and a strange, spacey girl leads him to a perfect-looking house in the middle of the woods. There, she and her siblings, a younger a sister and older brother, live with a pair of seemingly loving, but extremely nervous parents.

The house is like a demented children’s paradise, full of stuffed animals and candy. Abruptly, the adults disappear and Cheon realizes he can’t leave; all paths seem to lead back to the house. Soon, he discovers that the eerie dream-world the children live in masks some horrible secrets.

Yim effectively creates a very creepy atmosphere, and as the tale unfolds, it’s sufficiently unsettling. It’s also a bit too long; two hours seems more than this journey requires. As such, it tends to linger too much on each step of the story, killing its momentum. The story’s pay-off is genuinely intriguing but, again, it’s all too easy to find pathos in mistreated children. Hansel & Gretel is an effective fantasy, but when it wanders into those waters, it’s punching above its weight.

HANSEL & GRETEL OPENS THIS FRIDAY,
MARCH 6