A Grimm Story, Finally Grim Enough
Osgood Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel is what happens when someone takes the old Brothers Grimm safety warning—“don’t go into the forest, kids”—and shoots it like arthouse horror instead of a sugary studio remake. This is not the candy-coated cottage of your childhood; it’s a slow, beautifully rotting nightmare where every tree feels like it’s judging you and every shadow looks like it has a backstory.
A Fairy Tale That Remembers It’s a Horror Story
The film cleverly flips the title, putting Gretel first, and that’s not just marketing flair. This is her story, her moral crisis, and her coming-of-age… in the sense that she might be coming of age into someone you run from in the woods. The classic beats are here—lost children, creepy house, witch with a suspicious kitchen—but they’re filtered through a tone that’s more existential dread than jump-scare carnival.
Instead of asking, “Will the witch eat them?” the movie quietly wonders, “What if the girl realizes being the witch is kind of… an option?”
Gretel: Final Girl in Training
Sophia Lillis anchors the film as Gretel, a teen who’s too smart for her own safety and just young enough to still be pushed around by a world that wants her poor, scared, and quiet. She’s not just a caretaker to Hansel; she’s a buffer between him and the collapsing adult universe. When her mother threatens their lives and throws them out, you don’t feel like you’re in a fairy tale; you feel like you’re watching a historical drama about why therapy was invented.
Lillis plays Gretel with a mix of resignation and curiosity. You can see her evaluating every person and place—assessing danger but also opportunity. When the witch, Holda, starts hinting at her “potential,” Gretel doesn’t just recoil. She listens. And that’s when the movie gets interesting… and a little deliciously wrong.
Hansel: Little Brother, Big Liability
Sam Leakey’s Hansel is not the sharpest axe in the woods, but that’s the point. He’s earnest, hopeful, and just naive enough to believe that free food in a forest can possibly be a good sign. He wants to be a woodsman, he wants a home, he wants stability—all the things Gretel isn’t sure she believes in anymore.
Their dynamic is classic sibling horror: she’s dragging the weight of responsibility, he’s dragging the weight of his own optimism. Gretel loves him, but you can feel the strain. When she ultimately sends him away to protect him, it’s both heroic and chilling—as if she’s saying, “Leave now, before I become something you’ll need a priest for.”
Holda: The Witch as Career Counselor
Alice Krige’s Holda is the kind of witch who could lure you in with a plate of food and a really persuasive TED Talk about self-empowerment and human sacrifice. She’s not cackling; she’s calm, nurturing, and unnervingly practical. The house is warm, the table is full, and she never raises her voice—just your existential crisis.
The film gives her depth: she was once a mother, then a victim, then something much, much worse. She doesn’t just eat children because she’s evil; she eats them because power has become her coping mechanism. It’s the worst possible self-care routine, and Gretel is the one person perceptive enough to see both the horror and the temptation in it.
A Visual Feast, No Candy Required
Visually, Gretel & Hansel is a low-budget marvel. With a reported $5 million budget, it looks like a much pricier production that got lost on the way to the A24 offices. The woods feel endless and unnatural, a geometric purgatory of deep blues, sickly oranges, and silhouettes sharp enough to cut.
The house itself is a character: black, angular, more monolith than cottage. Inside, the color palette shifts between warmth and menace, like the building can’t decide whether it’s a sanctuary or an oven. The production design embraces simplicity; there are no gimmicky CGI monsters, just carefully composed rooms that look like they were built for rituals, not dinner.
Sound, Silence, and the Art of Unease
The sound design and score work like a slow-acting spell. There are synth tones, droning hums, and stretches of silence where you start to notice every creak, breath, and crackle of the fire. The movie doesn’t go for loud orchestra stabs or cheap jolts; it prefers to sit next to you on the couch and whisper, “You know this isn’t going to end well, right?”
It’s not the kind of horror that makes you jump; it’s the kind that makes you stare at the corner of your room later and wonder if the shadows are getting a little too organized.
Pacing: Hypnotic… or Just Slow, Depending on You
Let’s address the charred elephant in the room: the pacing. Gretel & Hansel moves at the speed of a bad decision forming. Some viewers found it too slow, and that’s fair—if you came for a roller coaster of witchy chaos, this is more like an eerie cable car that occasionally stops to let you marinate in the implications.
But when the movie works, that slowness feels intentional. It’s less “nothing is happening” and more “everything is happening very quietly and that’s worse.” The long pauses give space to the moral tension: Gretel’s pull toward power, Hansel’s blind trust, Holda’s seductive logic. The film is less interested in body count than in soul trajectory.
Feminist Fairy Tale or Origin Story of a Villain?
One of the film’s best tricks is refusing to give you a neat moral. Yes, it’s about children in danger. Yes, it’s about a witch. But it’s also about a girl realizing she doesn’t want to live in a world where every man is a threat or a disappointment, and every woman is either a victim or a servant.
Holda offers something darker: autonomy, power, and freedom—even if it’s drenched in blood and roasted over an open flame. Gretel’s choice to stay and hone her powers is both triumphant and unsettling. This isn’t some sanitized “girlboss” moment; it’s more like, “I will not be devoured by this world. I might, however, learn to devour it back.”
When her fingertips begin to turn black in the final moments, it’s not just a horror stinger. It’s a thesis statement: power leaves a mark, and you don’t get it wholesale without a little corruption in the bargain.
Acting: Small Cast, Big Impact
Lillis, Leakey, and Krige carry the majority of the film, and there’s almost no weak link. Lillis grounds everything; even when the dialogue leans a bit stylized, she sells Gretel’s inner conflict. Krige is magnetic—her mere presence feels like a warning sign carved into the air. Leakey, in his debut, does exactly what Hansel needs to do: make you worry for him without wanting to strangle him.
The supporting roles—the huntsman, the mother, the eerie “beautiful child”—add texture and history to the world without pulling focus from the central trio. Everyone feels like they belong to the same grim universe, which is harder to pull off than it looks.
Final Verdict: A Dark Spell Worth Falling Under
Gretel & Hansel isn’t for everyone. If your idea of horror is wall-to-wall jump scares and a body count high enough to require a spreadsheet, this will feel too quiet, too weird, too patient. But if you like your fairy tales properly grim, your witches morally complicated, and your horror more about mood than mayhem, this is a small, sharp gem.
It looks gorgeous, sounds unsettling, and offers a surprisingly thoughtful spin on a story usually told with candy canes and oven gags. Here, the oven still matters—but what really lingers is the realization that the girl who survived the witch might just become something scarier. And honestly? Good for her… and terrible for everyone else who wanders into those woods.
