Synopsis
Eun-su, a troubled young man, has a car accident in a lost mountain road. When Eun-su wakes up, he finds a mysterious girl, dressed up like Little Red Ridinghood that helps him leading him into a fairytale scenario, into her own house deep in the middle of a forest. The main character soon meets her siblings and the couple supposed to be their parents. An obvious nerve-wracking tension and a mysterious atmosphere dominant inside the house contrast with the colorful and visually detailed ambiance of each different set. The story then details each day in which Eun-su tries desperately to run away from the house, without success.
Hansel and Gretel is a well-known fairytale of German origin describing the story of a young brother and sister threatened by a cannibalistic witch living in a deep forest in a house made of cake and sugar. As it is later revealed in the movie, the storyline has a direct inspiration in the fairytale itself, including several references that may therefore be observed during the film, gently reminding us of the fairytale: the house, the forest, cupcakes, cookies, cream and sugar, the bread crumbs or an adult pushed into a burning fireplace.
Although for some of us, children may represent one of the best explored scary sources in horror movies, with Hansel and Gretel, the director has decided to take a different path for a story that may not even be considered as a horror film. As soon revealed, the children have supernatural powers, punishing the bad grown-ups which continue to disappoint them. Although some scenes are particularly well achieved in the horror domains (transformation of one of the characters into a living doll or the suggestion that another character was literally cooked and eaten by the inhabitants of the house), the supernatural powers of the children are somehow poorly developed during the plot. As the film goes and the tension increases, the plot appears to take a different path becoming in a certain way a meaningful story that has something to say about the abandon and the abusive treatment of children or about the hypocrisy of Christian institutions. Hansel and Gretel is thus probably better described as a mysterious dark fantasy played safely, with strong points of interest but somehow lacking something more.
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