Gretel & Hansel, directed by Oz Perkins, is another adaptation of the famous Grimm fairy tale about a brother and sister abandoned in the woods by their stepmother and father, but this time the focus shifts from Hansel to his now-older sister Gretel. This is clear from the title itself, which puts Gretel’s name first (she is played by It star Sophia Lillis). If you strip away all the familiar elements from the original tale and get right to the point, Gretel & Hansel — very much like Robert Eggers’s The Witch — is the story of a young and innocent girl standing at a crossroads between darkness and light.

However, Gretel’s reflections on this, delivered through such a direct and overused device as voice-over narration, turn out to be a fairly banal set of “right thoughts,” and her actions suffer from predictability. Moreover, her monologues are written in a lofty style that, while matching the film’s refined visuals, doesn’t fit the character — a simple village teenage girl.

This pompous artificiality, which turns into a feminist manifesto about liberation (from men, base desires, and passions) and the importance of forging your own path, causes more alienation than acceptance. The story itself loses tension and edge — so crucial for a proper horror movie.

In the end, screenwriter Rob Hayes falls into the very trap he warns his heroine about — he trades the chance to show a well-known story from a new angle and offer viewers something original for the desire to please the social trends of today. This is doubly disappointing, since everything else — the visuals, the sound, and the acting — in Gretel & Hansel is worthy of praise. Apparently, for Oz Perkins, directing a film not based on his own script for the first time, it’s best not to do so again, or at least to be much more selective about the source material.

Most of Gretel & Hansel is shot in 1.55:1 format (with some inserts, like the story about the girl in the pink bonnet, presented in widescreen). In this format, the frame is cropped at the sides rather than the top and bottom, as we’re used to in the age of wide screens. Thanks to this, the trees in the forest (where much of the story takes place) look even taller, and the children appear smaller and more vulnerable. The same technique was used in Eggers’s The Witch, though with a slightly different ratio of 1.66:1.

Triangles and pyramid shapes appear often in the film’s buildings and various objects. In occult symbolism, triangles can represent a prison that magical abilities are trapped in, struggling to break free. That’s why the witch’s house, and her hideout in the opening story about the beautiful girl, are pyramid-shaped.

Secondly, triangles — with their sharp angles — effectively convey a sense of danger, and in shadow they look especially menacing. Basically, a triangle can simply mean “evil.” For example, we see this shape outside the house of the disgusting landlord whom Gretel visits for a job interview. In Gretel & Hansel, the triangle also symbolizes the trio of main characters.

Gretel & Hansel is far from the first film to use triangle symbols. You can also find them in horror films like Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space, and Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy. In all these cases, triangles are linked to various forms of occultism. The origin of this trend goes back to Cosmatos’s masterpiece Beyond the Black Rainbow (credit to Reddit users for this discovery).

Thirdly, the triangle is also used in the film as a female symbol. Interestingly, in perception psychology, triangles often refer to masculinity, which is why they appear in logos of brands targeting men. But in the film, given the previous two points, the triangle = evil. That means the source of all evil is found in the masculine. This is explicitly stated in Gretel & Hansel in one of the final scenes.

At the start of the film, Gretel prepares for a job interview with a wealthy landlord and muses on the origin of fairy tales. She gives as an example the one where a prince awakens the heroine — a clear nod to Sleeping Beauty. Thanks to Disney, we all know this fairy tale with its balls, pretty dresses, and happy ending. But Gretel, recalling the story and going to her interview, doesn’t find a charming prince, but rather a disgusting old man who sees her as a sex worker.

In the original 1634 fairy tale by Giambattista Basile, the “Sleeping Beauty” is poisoned and left to die in the woods, where she’s found by a “prince” who then rapes her. The film hints that Gretel’s world is nothing like the fairy tales we’re used to today.

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