Following up on last year’s Judy & Punch, we have another retelling of a famous piece of folklore that announces its intentions right with the title: The woman comes first. However, more so than the uneven feminist rhetoric of Judy, this film is a lot closer to The VVitch, both because it involves one, but also in how it turns nature (both human and environmental) into its bedrock for horror.
Every aspect of the production here is designed to create unease, and it all works beautifully. Galo Olivares’ cinematography creates an unnerving emphasis on the characters against the world around them, utilising fixed perspectives and depth of field to literally focus on Gretel and Hansel as utterly and heartbreakingly alone. This is added to by Josh Ethier and Julia Wong’s precise editing, which occasionally dips into music-video-horror territory but mostly serves to further the suffocating atmosphere.
Then there’s Robin Coudert’s soundtrack work, where the anachronistic electronics raise the tension levels surprisingly high, like in a mushroom-influenced sequence that is genuinely horrifying in its presentation without going for full psychedelics.
The treatment of the original fairy tale deserves credit too, as writer Rob Hayes digs deep into the viscera of the story to unearth some ideas that manage to make the idea of a cannibalistic witch even grimmer than the Brothers themselves managed. It’s a destitute place where Gretel and Hansel reside from, where their mother has gone insane and Gretel comes dangerously close to being brought into a house of ill repute, such is the need for work. There are no breadcrumb trails to be found, but that’s only because they have no desire to find their way back.
From there, it fleshes out the story of the Witch and ties it into Gretel’s to create an examination of feminine power that, again, feels right at home alongside similar themes in VVitch. The pithy and often-rhymed dialogue certainly adds to the effect, as does Alice Krige’s skin-crawling performance, but the main impact comes out of the two’s connection to the darkness, how much man’s world fears them and why there’s likely a good reason for that. That gets intertwined with the imagery, which adds mythic textures to the details of the story that make this feel not revisionist, but its own brand of haunting folklore. For example, one of the more popular aspects of the original fairy tale is the Witch cooking children to serve at her table. While we don’t technically see that happen here, what we do see is somehow even more insidious.
I freely admit that this film’s thematic take on witchcraft didn’t gel with me as well as VVitch or the Suspiria remake, but with style this strong and lead performances this solid (Sophia Lillis adds to her pedigree for horror-tinged coming-of-age yarns), that becomes something of an afterthought next to what this gets right. I hesitate to call this a modern revision of an older story because it all feels too rustic and ingrained in cultural specifics to feel out of place temporally. Stories like this only survive for as long as they do because they get shared through the generations, with each bringing their own perspective to the larger tapestry, and this makes for a sturdy thread to one of the Western world’s most famous tales.
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