Movie Talk -- Gretel and Hansel (2020)
Greetings, Mars Land community members. I am @william8wayward, coming to you with the latest in my series of Movie Talks. I hope you enjoy my introduction of Gretel and Hansel, and I wish this community success going forward on the great Steemit platform.
I intend to introduce the movie to you, then set you free to watch, if you so choose. I'm not going to tell you the ending.
Characterized by YouTube Movies as a Horror flik, Gretel and Hansel is a fairy tale told cinematically with a decidedly dark edge. This 2020 film was directed by Oz Perkins.
You may be familiar with the fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel", a story that I grew up with, wherein a couple of wandering children happen upon a witch's cottage in the forest and fall under captivity of the witch, who has evil plans of fattening the children and baking them into pies. In the "original" fairy tale, the children escape their fate, and it is the witch who ends up in the oven. In Gretel and Hansel things turn out somewhat differently.
The film begins with a telling of a fairy tale of its own, one that Gretel and Hansel themselves grew up with: the story of the girl with the pink cap. This opening segment is narrated by the witch that Gretel and Hansel eventually meet in the woods.
But why, you might ask, do two children go wandering in the woods alone during a time of Plague? Simply put, their mother kicks them out of the house with a threat:
Be gone, or I'll hack you into tiny little pieces.
She punctuates this morbidity with an axe that she swings into the dinner table.
The first ally they encounter on their journey is a Huntsman, who kills a zombie-like assailant with an arrow to save their lives. He offers to lead them to foresters so that Hansel might take up an axe to earn "plentiful coin" and food. Gretel is told that she will learn the ways of "herbs and the earth."
Gretel doesn't trust the intentions of the Huntsman, and she inquires as to what he wants from them for his assistance. He replies,
Kindness is its own reward, and cruelty is a self-inflicted wound.
The Huntsman sends them on their way with a map and a warning not to stray from the path for fear of wolves.
As time goes by, their hunger mounts. Gretel finds some mushrooms growing on the forest floor. Gretel speaks to the mushrooms, asking them if they can eat them. It seems the way of plants is natural to Gretel from the start. She listens, and the mushrooms tell her that she and her brother should eat them.
Food is central to both "Hansel and Gretel" and Gretel and Hansel. In the former, the children mark the way they've come with a breadcrumb trail that eventually gets consumed by birds or animals, so that they become lost. In the latter, the evidently psychedelic mushrooms they consume leads Gretel to hear a voice calling her:
Follow me, sister.
I'm not going to tell you the whole story. I hope you have enjoyed reading my post. I encourage you to watch the movie and determine for yourself the lesson this tale transmits.
At the very beginning of the movie, the Witch of the Wood narrates:
Come children and listen, for the story I tell contains a lesson -- a lesson that someday might keep you safe, so gather in close.
If I could extract a small lesson from the movie, I would share with you a conversation between Gretel and Hansel, early in their stay with the Witch of the Wood:
Gretel: But tell me what hides behind that pleasantness. There are things here, bad things.
Hansel: What bad things?
Gretel: Abundance, for one.
Hansel: What's that mean?
Gretel: It means too much.
...
Hansel: But why do you always see a problem, something behind or under...a thing hidden...?
Gretel: The big bad world is what it is.