MOVIE REVIEW: Hansel & Gretel (2007)
This movie was billed to me as a Korean horror story, and indeed it was. But it was very much a sad story also. If I could find a way to make you understand how much this movie is awesome and fucked-up at the same time, it probably wouldn’t be a review. Let’s try, tho.
So a salesman named Eun-soo crashes his car off a remote highway after being an ass to his pregnant girlfriend over the cellphone. He then wakes up to go find help and finds the “Home for Happy Children”. There he meets three kids: wild-eyed Man-bok, pretty Young-hee, and the cute-as-a-button Jung-soon. They live there with their mom and dad in an idyllic setting for children: they have all they toys they could want, everything is bright and colorful, and they eat nothing but cookies and cake and candy for every meal every day. The parents seem pretty chill, except when it comes to answering Eun-soo’s simple questions about how to contact the outside world. It’s pretty obvious that something isn’t right when the wife’s tell is out in plain sight for everyone to see…if the lack of parental control over their environment wasn’t a dead giveaway. The movie kicks into high gear when another couple shows up: an aspiring Christian deacon named Byun and his wife, Kyung-sook. It goes without saying that everything is not what it seems…even with these two.
After watching the movie, I had an intense discussion with other people whom I watched the movie with, namely about how the state of the plot was achieved. It’s obvious the inspiration for the visuals came from many iterations of the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”. But more succinctly, how did these kids and their home become this way? It’s the kind of thing one should only experience by watching this movie. Granted, some of the people I watched this with thought the movie ran slow but that’s par the course for an Asian film that has no martial arts content (unless it’s a Zhang Yimou film).
This movie really began to pull at my heart towards the end, and explained almost everything. Not bad for a horror movie.
— previously published 6/12/2016 on Facebook Notes —
