If Terrence Malick decided to remake The Witch and include elements of Grimm fairytales, it might look something like Gretel & Hansel. Though the plot -- what little of it there is -- of this picture essentially hits the main expected points of anything adapting the old story, plot is so secondary you might be convinced that the plot has been effectively erased here. This is not a mystery, and it's not even very thrilling or scary. Even its themes are so abstract it's hard to say I really grasped what the film was going for, and though I enjoyed it, I'm keenly aware that lengthy bits escaped me. I can't even say confidently that I "understood" parts of the movie. But its beautiful, dark aesthetic captured my heart, and I'm looking forward to watching it again.
We begin with a prologue that dramatizes, through montage, the witch's backstory: a young, hyper-feminized girl (dressed in anachronistic pink) is discovered to have "second sight" and the power to induce other people to kill themselves. Her motives are unclear, but when she is exiled to the deep, dark forest, she enchants her new home to apparently lure in stray children. As an older woman, the witch is a deliciously wicked-looking old crone who wears all black with a pointed hat Elphaba would envy, but her most recognizable feature is her fingers, which are mostly black as if she had dipped them in a vat of tar.
Immediately apparent is the emphasis on female power here: after this opening sequence, we're introduced to Gretel, age 16, and her brother Hansel, age 8. And of course the inverted title of the film indicates the shifting power dynamic from male to female; this is, unequivocally, Gretel's story, and so her name is first in the title. Their mother, driven mad by starvation -- there's a famine in the land -- sends Gretel out to make a living. When Gretel realizes the only options are to be abused by men or to starve, she chooses the latter, only to have her mother despairingly attack her. Fleeing into the forest with her brother, Gretel is forced to act as a mother while trying to find safe haven and food. After a particularly bad trip on some mushrooms they consume, the children find a lonely house in the woods.
Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat's Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) is up to his usual tricks here, and it certainly won't be to everyone's liking. He is a master of the slow-burner, deliberately pacing his dark fantasies until they are almost inert, forcing us to meditate on the horrors on screen. In this way, Perkins has set himself up as a new genre auteur vitally interested in philosophical horror (as opposed to the more traditional, popular brands). And while you might not expect this approach to a Grimm brothers fantasy, Perkins has anticipated that.
He weaves a spell of modernity into his apparently timeless tale, including themes of untrustworthy adults as well as feminism, capitalist awareness (everything comes with a cost) as well as where, exactly, witches (and fairytale stories themselves) come from. These added conceits make the story deeper and more interesting even if they don't add excess baggage to the simple plot. Similarly, Perkins's aesthetic hints at this melding of past and future, modern and timeless: the forest and village seem haunted by ages and sins past, while the witch's house is cold and erect, strikingly modern even as it feels old as time. Its cold, white basement is hidden effectively by layers of worn wood and a warm hearth with a veritable feast day after day. It's all carefully calculated to be uncanny, that is, at once beautiful and wrong.
After the widescreen prologue, the film closes into a storytelling format that makes everything appear contained within pages of a book or old photographs. Cinematographer Galo Olivares (Roma) seems to understand that the nature of his medium in this instance is best married to the material. But his delivery, combined with Perkins's vision, is uncommonly beautiful. Much like in Malick's work, the first half of Gretel & Hansel uses an active handheld camera to follow the kids into the woods as we hear Gretel's abstract voiceover narration; it's an odd choice, one that draws a parallel between the naturalistic and poetic in fairytale stories. But, especially once the kids are in the witch's home -- which is decidedly not made of gingerbread -- the lighting dramatically shifts into the realm of giallo, with strong red, yellow, and blue lights shining in from various obscure angles.
I am still hopelessly confused on the inclusion of Charles Babalola as a huntsman. The scene involves the children seeking shelter for the night before being attacked by something (it has the form of a person, but is it? Who knows?) that is promptly killed by the huntsman. He warns the children of wolves nearby, suggesting that he's actually on his way to a different Grimm story in the same woods, but then he disappears for the rest of the movie. He'll not be coming to Gretel's rescue. Other questions remain after the film ends, including why the woodshed is so terrifying and any sort of real understanding of what the witch is really up to. And while a repeat viewing might answer some questions for me, it won't answer all, and I don't think I want it to. The mystery and magic works best when we're still digging for significance. As an atmospheric descent into a familiar story reworked into something dazzlingly beautiful and bafflingly complex, Gretel & Hansel is already one of the most interesting movies of the new year.
No comments:
Post a Comment