I suppose reinventing old fairy tales is all the rage these works and returning them to their horror roots seems like an obvious choice. Unfortunately this one doesn’t quite work, being mostly focused on the superficial cues that evoke horror while not investing in worldbuilding at all and having a childishly straightforward plot. The result is a strange mishmash of Disney-level horror aesthetics with real murders and gore.

Gretel and Hansel are two children in a plague-stricken village. After their father dies, Gretel goes to a rich man’s house to ask for a job as a housekeeper. However he reveals his evil intentions when he asks her if she is a virgin and so she leaves without the job. This angers their mother who turns them out saying she does not have the means to support them. They wander through the woods, are attacked by some kind of ghoul and saved by a hunter who directs them to a group of foresters. Eventually they arrive at a house and they can see plenty of food inside it. The owner is an old woman who is of course a witch but seems to welcome both of them. Even as the witch starts teaching her and as Hansel tries to learn to be a woodcutter, Gretel gets horrible dreams about the true fate of the children who are drawn to the house.

As you can see, this is absolutely bog standard story that adapts the Gretel and Hansel in the most boring, unimaginative way possible. So Gretel herself has witch powers, big deal. The film’s major fault is that it makes no effort towards building up the world that the two children lives in at all. We have no idea what normal life is like before their father died and no baseline by which to make a comparison before all of the supernatural phenomena comes into play. It seems totally ridiculous that their mother would throw them out like that and that no one else in the village can help. As such, we don’t have any sympathy for the two characters at all and for all we know it is perfectly normal in this world to get attacked by ghouls or to be able to use magic. The film is more interested in the fairy tale that Hansel likes to hear about another girl who has witch powers and that of course ties in with the witch they meet. This is a very Disney way of doing things but it’s so distant and disconnected from the two children that it fails to inspire fear.

This film’s idea of horror is start with creepy imagery and then progressively going for more explicit goriness over time. This means plenty of shots of the witch in silhouette appearing mysteriously in the woods, the witch pouring out of a faucet like a liquid, body parts of children and so on. It’s icky but not really scary at all because it’s all too over the top to be believable. It’s the same way that dream visions aren’t scary because we already know they’re not real. It doesn’t make sense why the witch would take in and train Gretel knowing her own backstory, making Gretel’s inevitable triumph at the end even more implausibly easy.

I suppose it would be expecting too much out of a fairy tale cash-in movie. Anyway we already have a fantastic film based on a very similar premise in the form of The Witch and this newer movie’s only value is to serve as a counterexample of getting everything wrong.