Warning! Spoilers for Gretel & Hansel below.

Oz Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel is as gorgeous as it is strange, putting an even darker twist on a 200 year fairy tale. This is the third film from the director, following 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter and 2016’s I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House. The slow-burner stars Sophia Lillis as Gretel, Sammy Leakey as Hansel, and Alice Krige as Holda/The Witch.

As with Perkins’ previous two films, Gretel & Hansel drips with atmosphere. There’s a brilliant use of color throughout, showing that every scene was shot with a specific look in mind. It creeps with an ominous dread that can feel like molasses at times, but it’s hard not to admire the world that’s been created. It’s a haunting art piece that makes audiences feel like they’re inside a fairy tale.

The synopsis of Gretel & Hansel is fairly similar to the original story. Two siblings are lost in the woods and stumble upon a house that smells of delicious food. Within the house is a feast and an old woman named Holda with black fingers and teeth, who invites the children to stay and eat. Of course, Holda is actually a child-eating witch with her own plans for Gretel and Hansel.

What Happens In Gretel & Hansel’s Ending

After failing to poison her, Gretel is taken down to the room below the house and Holda’s plan is revealed. To allow her powers to grow, the witch intends on cooking and feeding Hansel to Gretel. She’s then restrained to a dinner table and forced to bear witness to her brother’s demise. The witch makes Hansel begin climbing a ladder with a cage at the top, where he will be roasted alive on the fire pit. Gretel then uses her newly-acquired psychokinetic abilities to make Holda’s wooden staff fly through the air and pin her above the fire pit, where she is burned to death. This frees Hansel from his trance-like state.

With the witch dead and her new powers, Gretel charms a horse and sends Hansel back home with a bag full of precious stones and jewelry. She intends to stay at the cabin to use Holda’s books to grow her powers for the forces of good. She later goes to the woods surrounding the cabin where she sees the souls of the children the witch had killed and frees them. However, right after this, Gretel’s fingers turn black, just like Holda’s. The mark of evil tells Gretel her choice to use her powers solely for good may be harder than she expects.

Will Gretel Become The New Evil Witch?

Despite her intentions to develop her powers for good, Gretel will have to face her innate, evil impulses that come with these abilities. At a time where she is coming into her own and becoming a woman, she must find her own path, making this just as much of a coming-of-age film for the character as it is a horror film for everyone else. Indeed, she could end up a child-eater like the evil witch if she doesn’t keep her dark side in check. One only needs to look at how Holda herself came to be the evil creature she was. We discover that Holda ate two of her children to become more powerful, but not before being wooed herself by a tempting darkness. She was a good woman who ultimately succumbed to evil, and this power struggle is something that Gretel will inevitably struggle with.

The possibility of a continuation of Gretel’s story isn’t completely out of the question, either. In a podcast interview with The Boo Crew, Oz Perkins says that the idea was to create a fairytale universe – a place that multiple tales could share the same world. Most notably, he said, “The idea is that Gretel could certainly go forth from this movie and get into more trouble.”  It’s clear that Perkins is invested in the story and has a vision for more if warranted.

Gretel & Hansel Is About Receiving Gifts

The overarching theme of the film that’s mentioned more than once refers to gifts. Or, receiving gifts. What Holda wants out of the children is questioned when she allows them to stay at her cabin and eat as much food as they want. The face Gretel leaves the audience with when her fingers grow black also echo that no gift is really free. The lesson here is an easy one. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. There’s always a catch.

The film’s own fairy tale within the fairy tale sets up the potential consequences of receiving a gift at the very beginning, and intentionally so. A desperate family, which is later revealed to be Holda’s, goes to an enchantress to heal their ill child. The enchantress takes the illness from the child, but replaces it with a seed of darkness in the form of a magical gift. Ultimately, the cost of the gift was far worse than any illness that afflicted the child, and was the reason Holda turned into the evil witch she eventually became in Gretel & Hansel.

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  • Hansel and Gretel Release Date: 2020-01-31