Gretel & Hansel (2020)

Gretel & Hansel | 3.5/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 8/30/2025

"What if this children's story was actually dark?" This was the question put forward by every half-baked message board and your friend's older brother while he sat in his poster-covered basement room. It got to the point that you couldn't talk about almost any generally positive story or media geared toward entertainment without it getting brought up. "Ed Edd and Eddy were dead the whole time," "Gilligan's Island was actually hell, and Gilligan was the devil punishing them," "The Rugrats were dead the whole time."

I have so little patience for that line of thinking because it's never as deep as people pretend it is. All it does is inject a mean-spirited, reductive irony into a story that was never meant to be thought of that way. It's not clever to come up with that; if anything it showcases a lack of imagination or willingness to engage with media on its own merit. I mention this, because the 2000s and 2010s were a glut of fairy-tale retellings. Even something as relatively lightweight as The Brothers Grimm fed into this, with every new iteration of "children's story . . . for ADULTS" coming out being worse than the last. Because of this I decided to pass when Oz Perkins gave us Gretel & Hansel in 2020. I wasn't familiar with him and hadn't seen any of his work before, so what felt like another in a long line of "dark fairy tales" didn't interest me at all.

Happily, now that I've seen it, I can say the man managed to maintain a much stronger level of that feeling of confused magic that fairy tales gave me as a child. We follow the basic bones of the original story, but this time the focus has been put more so on Gretel. Getting sent away from home due to their mother's lack of ability to support them, Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and Hansel (Samuel Leakey) are sent into the woods in hopes of finding a way to support themselves. Stumbling across the witch's home after days of travel, the feast-filled dining room entices them to stay with the mysterious woman who greets them. The witch's house is an uncomfortable location. Deep in the woods with a sort of playful yet foreboding wallpaper in many of the rooms, the entire building is lit only by candles and the yellow light filtered through the tinted glass windows. Children's toys litter the surrounding landscape. Their shoes hang from the trees, their toys clog the streams, and their voices softly echo throughout the otherwise silent forest. It's a dark home, and its clean, angular lines of construction cause it to stand out from the surrounding wilderness even more than it would otherwise.

Coming of age is a consistent theme explored here. Gretel is questioned by a leering landowner if she is still "intact" at the opening of our tale. This, alongside other situations that arise, set her up as somebody who is forced to reckon with the full weight of an uncaring world, regardless of her age. Hansel is consistently held against her as a sort of beacon of innocence, contrasting against a world she knows to be dangerous and not what it seems. Some of these moments are what help maintain our sense of fairy-tale suspension as well. “Gretel, it smells of cake and I’m unable to resist” feels like something taken directly from a Frog and Toad story, further forcing a gulf between the siblings as our tale progresses. His childish understanding of how the world works does wonders keeping us atmospherically on track while also helping to obscure the times where Gretel can feel a little too modern in her actions and attitude.

I tend to be cautious of stories about a young woman coming of age told by men, but even though those elements feature here, Perkins manages to avoid falling into the more obvious and frustrating pitfalls some male creatives can tend to hit (looking at you, Stephen King). All in all I found Gretel & Hansel to be a charming time. Clocking in at just under 90 minutes, the story oozes atmosphere without overstaying its welcome. There’s just enough here to keep you wondering, all while maintaining a solid fairy-tale conclusion. Probably a little too heavy for kids, but perfect if you’re looking to ramp things up for teens or just ring in the Halloween season.