Hansel & Gretel

Hansel & Gretel

Starring: Jeong-myeong Cheon, Sim Eun-kyung, Yeong-Nam Jang, Ji-hee Jin

Directed by: Pil-sung Yim

Reviewed by: Conor Flynn






• 55 minute making of featurette
• Interview with VFX director
• Interview with Production Designer
• Trailers

Amazing how time flies? It seems like only yesterday since Asian horror exploded into mainstream consciousness with the utterly terrifying ‘Ringu’. After years of lacklustre American efforts, ‘Ringu’ returned the horror genre to its psychological roots. But that was well over ten years ago. With the Asian horror cycle looking pretty exhausted at this stage, the prospect of having to watch yet more of the same old same old is rather daunting, however, with similarities made to ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, Hansel & Gretel at least promises something a bit fresher…

Salesman Eun-soo (Cheon) crashes his car into a nearby forestry only to discover a mysterious girl who leads him to a strange house named the ‘Home of Happy Children’. Here he finds a couple and two other children. Soon Eun-soo discovers that finding a way out of the forest is quite difficult and that the children are not all they seem to be…

The comparison to Guillermo Del Toro’s work is certainly well founded; however, a better likeness to this piece is the third segment to ‘Twilight Zone: The Movie’ by director Joe Dante. That story, in which a driver is lead to a house by a child who holds a number of adults hostage through the use of supernatural powers, is strikingly similar, though it probably isn’t a conscious one. This still doesn’t stop the film from feeling overly familiar. You get the usual, by the numbers, scare tactics such as a mysterious female figure with long hair who (unsuccessfully) tries to scare you. Thankfully the film trumps on a technical level. The music is fantastically eerie, some of the imagery is very memorable and after the initial clichés are done and dusted, the film eventually settles down into an interesting allegory about the abandonment of children.

The picture quality of the film is heavily compressed, pixelated and grainy to boot. The sound, in 2.0 and 5.1 Korean, is clear, but for this type of film, a little undernourished. The DVD has four extras, the first of which is a near hour long look behind the scenes in which the director gets to discuss his thoughts on the film. It is rather sparse on the details. Eventually this becomes irritating to the point that it seems as if the distributor forgot to add subtitles to the disc. This is glaringly apparent forty minutes in, when the director is chatting straight to camera, yet no subtitles appear. Admittedly this could be a simple fault with the screener that this reviewer received. Next up is an interview with the visual effects director who is slightly less than the apathetic towards his director. Another interview follows, this time with the production designer, which is fine. The final extras included are trailers.

Hansel & Gretel will appeal to those looking for a genuine Grimm fairytale, though the numerous similarities to other (better) works might be a little off putting for others. A word of warning, you should rent the DVD first before buying.