“Come children and listen,” intones the unseen narrator at the beginning of Gretel and Hansel, “to a story that will make you safe.” The question often asked about Brothers Grimm folk tales such as Hansel and Gretel is, “If these stories are supposed to be for children, then why are they so dark and frightening?” Part of the genius of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm was their knowing that children don’t only need light and comforting stories — they need the dark and frightening ones as well. Children need to be made to understand how dangerous the world can be, not to frighten them, but to make them safe. Naiveté can be endearing, but it also has its downsides. When unchecked, it can even get you killed. For hundreds of years, Brothers Grimm folk tales have enabled children to learn, without exposing them to real danger, just how dangerous the world really is.
This is the approach taken in Gretel and Hansel, Oz Perkins’s mostly satisfying film adaptation of the classic folk tale about two children kidnapped by a witch who lures them with free candy. Perkins interprets the legend as a cautionary tale designed to teach children, as the film’s unseen narrator exhorts, to “please, beware of gifts — beware of those who offer them, and beware of those who are only too happy to take them.” In Perkins’s version, however (and in the screenplay, written by Rob Hayes), there are a few twists, the most obvious being the film’s title: Instead of “Hansel and Gretel,” it is “Gretel and Hansel.” In the traditional version of the familiar tale, it is Hansel who comforts his slightly younger sister, Gretel; it is Hansel who comes up with the idea to leave a trail of pebbles and bread in the forest so that they might be able to find their way back home; and it is Hansel who otherwise looks after Gretel. But in Perkins’s treatment, Gretel is the inventive and responsible one, the wise older sister taking care of her naïve little brother. In this version, the children don’t end up at the witch’s house after birds eat the breadcrumbs they used to mark their way back home. And instead of being abandoned in the forest by a wicked stepmother (a common folkloric archetype), it is the children who decide they need to flee from their actual mother, who appears to be mad.
Gretel and Hansel thus set out on their own, traveling from inn to strange inn and wandering through tall, densely forested, Anselm Kiefer-esque landscapes. Indeed, many of the shots in Gretel and Hansel are rather elegantly composed. Some look like framed photographs; others, particularly those in which the burnt orange of evening fires is offset by midnight blue skies, look like oil paintings on canvas. The camera lingers over these images like a visitor in a quiet museum — longingly, but not for too long. There are other pressing matters at hand that must be attended to.
After tripping out on some magic forest mushrooms, Gretel and Hansel, their stomachs rumbling with hunger, come upon a dark little house with a tall, narrow roof shaped like a witch’s hat. (Cinematographer Galo Olivares has lots of fun with isosceles triangles and other occultic geometric symbols.) They smell something irresistibly delicious wafting out of the house. Hansel, his stomach now positively growling, squeezes his way in through the window, somewhat to the chagrin of his dubious older sister. She peeks inside to check if he is alright and sees a veritable feast laid out on a long wooden table. She watches with apprehension mingled with her growing appetite as her baby brother bites into a hot loaf of bread.
Like Miriam watching her baby brother Moses as he travels up the Nile in a papyrus basket, thinking he’ll be safe from Pharaoh’s order to kill all Israelite boys, only to see him snatched out of the water by Pharaoh’s daughter, Gretel sees her younger brother finally free of his hunger pangs but snatched away moments later by an old woman in a long, black gown. Like Miriam, who knew that to ensure her brother’s safety, she would need to find a way into Pharaoh’s court, Gretel knows that to save her brother, she must now enter the witch’s den. And now we know the rest of the story.
Or do we? The intriguing parts of Gretel and Hansel come in this portion of the film. In the Grimm version, this is where Hansel and Gretel conspire over how to save themselves from the dreaded witch. In Perkins’s version, however, Gretel shifts, or at least appears to shift, ever so slightly into the witch’s orbit. This sets in motion a sibling rivalry subplot and casts into doubt whether Gretel will attempt to save her brother at all, or whether she will surrender to the forces of the dark and yield to the temptation of becoming the wicked witch’s disciple.
I had thought that everyone was at least somewhat familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel, but apparently, I was wrong. “That was some wicked-ass woman,” a middle-aged man said to me on the way out of the theater. “Why’d she want to eat those kids? This is supposed to be a children’s story, but I don’t know who’d take their children to this. This is way too scary.”
“Yes, it is,” I said to him. “And that’s precisely the point.” The way to make children (and anyone) safer is not by telling them that witches and evil people who want to do them harm do not exist. It’s not by saying, “Don’t worry, that’s only a movie/story/legend, that could never happen in real life.” It’s by showing them movies such as Gretel and Hansel (or, better yet, by reading them stories such as the original Hansel and Gretel) and letting them know that, yes, evil does exist, but that they are more powerful than it. They can overcome it. They can learn how to defend themselves. They, like Gretel, can learn how to harness the forces of malevolence for good.
The real message of both Hansel and Gretel and Gretel and Hansel is simple: Everything that you need to defeat evil is already within you. All you need to do is to believe — not in dark magic or witchcraft, but yourself.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
