Review of Gretel & Hansel (2020) by Theredsky — 04 Feb 2020

Gretel and Hansel feels like Oz Perkins is trying to make his movie feel like a Robert Eggers film but it fails at that. The only aspects I really enjoyed were technical ones. The one element that I felt was great was the score by Robin Coudert.

It’s intense and is the only thing that causes some scenes to have some sort of tension. The cinematography was pretty good. It felt atmospheric and made some scenes look very visually interesting. The production design was pretty good also.

The sets look interesting and unique. As much as I enjoy the technical aspects, the rest of the film falls below average. The performances range from good to bad. Alice Krige did a good job as the witch.

She had her moments but there really wasn’t a whole lot to it. She was able to make her bad dialogue sound somewhat better. Sophia Lillis was decent as Gretel and Sam Leakey as Hansel was pretty bad.

Their performances are made a little worse by the script. The script is pretty bad. The dialogue spoken between characters is extremely awkward and poor and can cause you to look at the screen and think, “what the hell?”.

The characters were uninteresting to me. There wasn’t a lot to them that made me want to care about their struggles. The story and flow of events was very boring to me. Besides the visuals, there wasn’t anything that was getting me invested with what was going on.

The good thing though is that the film isn’t even an hour and a half long so it isn’t a pain to sit through but it felt a little bit longer due to pacing issues. The first act of the film goes by very quickly but the rest of the film is very slow.

It attempts to set up the characters and then drags out their encounter with the witch a little too much. Overall, Gretel and Hansel may have some great technical aspects but its performances, story, script, and pacing really drag the film down for me.