SPOILER DISCUSSION

1. The film’s focus on gender roles becomes explicitly grounded in the way it tackles motherhood and the social apparatus which uses fantasies involved with the same as a way to encapsulate femininity within strict normative parameters.

A-the fairy tale (the story of the “Beautiful child”) at the heart of this rendition of the Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel is a fictional ur-text to this commonly known fable and operates on much the same wavelength: a mother mistreats her child, leaves her in the forest, and supernatural forces conspire to consume the child.

While this is a simplified re-telling, the structure of it and the themes slot in neatly when compared to the source material; the only big change is the absence of the welcoming father from the original telling; instead, the children are just left with a despondent, cruel mother who kicks them. Thus, motherhood is granted the ultimate role within the film itself, the origins of exile.

B- Gretel is forced to act in lieu of any maternal figure and rear Hans who barrages her with childish inquiries and requests which eat into her own time. She gives up this role temporarily to Holda who becomes a surrogate (grand)mother to the siblings. But then Hansel explicitly denounces Holda as a maternal figure which precedes the schisms between the siblings that leaves Hans entrapped.

Thus, women are tasked with taking on jobs and roles related to care-taking, a fate that Gretel is reluctant to accept; she sees Holda as a key to figuring out a new path for her that works with the way she sees her subjectivity.

This is not a problem Hansel faces. He is tasked with becoming a wood-cutter and though he’s unable to do as much work as he’d like, he has a role set out for him that doesn’t feel inherently alienating.

This schism in available jobs is also reflective of the way the genders are coded to reflect their relation to the dominant power structures. Women are tasked with acting in line with nature, motherhood being a biological imperative (and the sex that precedes being hinted as a natural function which women should be ready to serve when the time comes). Meanwhile, men are tasked with molding nature, literally through the way they chop up the forest, the physical manifestation of this force, and symbolically in the way they enact laws.

Holda threatens to usurp this balance because she works through nature, taking calls from the beyond that places her as a different, more powerful representative than persons of the aforementioned binary schema. If nature is the chessboard, then the queen, the enchantress who has embraced herself, has all the power.

This difference in power vis-à-vis nature is reflected in the sequence starting near the 42-minute mark (after the 4th dream-sequence, see Point 2 -D). Hansel tries to cut down a tree, affirming his masculine role, but is unable to take out any tree besides the small one that matches his stature. After this mini-victory over the representative of nature, he is lured into the woods by an unseen force which distracts from his long-sought success.

We see him wander through the forests through a tracking shot and notice the section of the forest he’s passing is clearly haunted with shoes hanging off branches, signs of the slain children who look after this soon-to-be victim.

A witch appears in the forests, the source of this unconscious pull, and the camera zooms into her, demonstrating the strength of her powers. A voice from this figure enters his thoughts telling him to go “go look in the shed” to find a saw to sharpen “the bones of the dead.” The role set out for him is circumvented by this acolyte of nature who turns his labor on its head, indexing it towards death opposed to life.

The camera continues to push into the shed which opens up all while dissolving from the figure of the witch. Her power cannot be ignored and Hans will follow her orders.

Hans, in a daze, sits at the shed and continues to sharpen with a saw. Meanwhile, the figure of a witch watches him from the forests and ensures that he remains in his stupor, unable to resist in the slightest. A shot frames him through the doorway of the shed, highlighting the manner in which he has become a tool for the supernatural forces as his agency is subsumed.

Meanwhile, Gretel’s journey is far more fulfilling. She learns magic from Holda and goes out to nature to find her own path. The trees respond to this newfound enchanter, accepting her decision to enter into their domain. She sees a singular tree and beckons it forward with just her will. While her brother, even with a tool, could barely remove a small tree, Gretel, with just her mind, can move a mammoth specimen. The score gives way to an electric harmony which is both enchanting and evocative in how it dresses the magical moment with a serenity that marks the supernatural with a positive affect for the first time in the film’s run-time.

In this manner, the path of women becomes bifurcated: they can either work coded by nature, operating in positions granted fantastical importance like that of being a mother, or women can work for nature, listening to the calls of the supernatural and acting on them as they see fit. Their ability to influence the world and their own lives becomes heightened to the domain of men: both factions now attempt to “control” nature, one through might and the other through supernatural will. Thus, the supernatural acts as an inversion of humanity’s rulings and opens up new modes of transportation across the chess-board.

2.Perkins manipulates the film-space through the formal manner in which he sets up the oneiric stands of the film which inform and delineate the process by which the nightmare of the fable leaks into the “reality” of the story itself, confusing the boundaries on where the fairy tale ends and the story begins and neatly tying in all the major themes and ideas in a cohesive and satisfying manner.

A. The first such dream sequence starts on the first night of the siblings’ visit. We start with a shot of the house with the moon hanging outside; this is the domain of supernatural power and the lunar cycle, a short-hand allusion to witchcraft and its practices, showcases the progression of this dominion over what remains outside of it.

We see Gretel go to sleep and then dissolve from her sleeping face to visions, explicitly rendering such displays as dreams.

This initial dream acts as an analog to the initial interview sequence and sees the enchantress, cast in silhouette, sitting in the place of the interviewer; a new position has just opened up and Gretel is being evaluated.

A split-second cut shows the “Beautiful Child” quickly crossing the room, confusing the chronology and identity of the magical act. Is the older enchantress working with the child, or is the child a representative of this power in a more grandiose manner?

Gretel follows the child’s path and comes to a set of mirrors, each reflecting her person; she is being tasked with finding and affirming her identity.

She turns from the mirrors and children quickly occupy the reflective surfaces staring at the newfound enchantress-in-training.

A girl’s voice whispers: “My mother, she killed me. My mother, she ate me.” Death and consumption become explicitly linked and the identity of the one behind this nightmare continues to be clouded. Who is the mother being referred to and who is the poor child who has been consumed? Given the opening’s confirmation of the pink-capped girls powers, we immediately think that the mother is merely this malevolent presence grown up.

The optics of the situation become more complex when Gretel moves towards the pink-capped girl, framed in a corner with her visage hidden from the camera. The girl continues the narration and repeats: “What a pretty bird am I.”

This girl, a malevolent presence, is the newest person to have her humanity rendered animal, a bird instead of a pig, and her words, far from clarifying the situation only confound our understanding of as much; is this heinous witch somehow the victim of someone else entirely?

Gretel reaches her hand out as if trying to comfort the young child as the spectral children occupying the space of her former reflection desperately knock on the glass plane acting as barrier and scream “No!” when Gretel’s hand finally makes its way to the “Beautiful Child”; the act of connection ends in horror as the young girl’s head falls cleanly off.

It ends and Gretel wakes up, looking around the room to get her bearings and confirm that she was only experiencing dreams and nothing more tangible.

B. The second dream-sequence happens after the children have been introduced to the chess-game at the 35-minute mark. Once again, we’re treated to a shot of the triangular house but the moon has gone further in its arc; the supernatural influences are growing.

We see Gretel attempt to sleep. She closes her eyes and then quickly opens them again, giving the impression that rest has not visited her. But then she once again sees the fleeting image of the pink-capped child, a figure now definitively associated with her unconscious, peaking at her and gives chase.

She opens a door and is treated to a view of a basement, marked by a door that stretches from ceiling to floor, an unknown geographical development which leads us to believe that this is yet another one of Hansel’s excursions in the depths of her mind.

A disorienting tracking-shot emphasizing the wavering standing of Gretel marks her transition to this dream domain and the whispers of children creep in again: “Don’t look at us. Don’t look at us here. Down in our hole in the ground”

Yet, there are no children apparent in the setting. Gretel explores the seemingly bereft environment and notices only a glass pane in the ceiling which refracts light. But the description of the environment as being part of the “ground” brings up associations of the room with a basement, an impossibility given the aforementioned window.

Gretel turns and the room is now filled with a long table, filled with bodies that are draped with white covers. The camera arcs around the room, tying the image of the deceased with Gretel in an unholy configuration.

A shot of the feet, blocked against one another in the lower part of the frame, becomes grotesque as blood seeps out and down through the sheets while the pleading requests of the children continue to repeat. A scream from an unknown source breaks out and Gretel once again wakes up, the yellow light of emanating from the window suggesting a clear break from whatever was just happening.

This time the dream happened without sleep. The nightmare is beginning to wake up and take priority over the reality that Gretel is still holding onto as she checks her room and bed to verify whether or not her nightly excursion had actually happened.

Meanwhile, the mystery of the “Beautiful child” and the bodies of the unknown children only continues to grow. All we know is that these bodies have been marked by an obscene violence that resists deciphering.

Gretel’s morning routines has her coming face-to-face with the specters from her dream, but within the purview of the day, she’s unable to put the pieces together. She washes the clothes and the camera slowly zooms onto more doll-like figures hidden among the rocks — the children begging not to be seen.

Her inner monologue questions the reality of the dreams. She initially links them as a result to her consumption of such distinct food before questioning whether or not they serve as a message from her unconscious, a warning from herself to herself meant to be decoded.

We later learn that her questions all point to a truth as this is both a warning from the specters watching whose bodies also serve as the true ingredients of the meals she consumes before sleeping.

She walks over a solid mass in the ground — the glass-paned ceiling from the basement — but is unable to parse what it is even after knocking against it. An overhead shot reveals to us what she cannot see, confirming the size and shape of the same nightmarish window which marks the god-forsaken hole in the ground trapping the kids.

The slow push-in of the house’s window, the same entrance which Gretel peeked in earlier, confirms the presence of another force privy to this engagement, and a quick cut to the inside of the house reinforces as much, as the cat, the iconic symbol of the witch, appears in a doorframe and quickly moves across, signaling to us that there is indeed another party involved in this hallucinatory skirmish, a party that’s still biding their time and wait to make themselves explicitly known.

C: The third dream-sequence is where the form is able to work within its grammar to start twisting the narrative and blurring the oneiric line. We start in a scene of reality following her moment of magical discovery where she learned she could bend trees (nature) down with the power of just her will; the boundary to magic has been broken, usurping the framing power of reality and its seemingly petty rules, and thus the dream world can happen unprompted.

Gretel is once again put to task by Hansel; the younger of the two is terrified of the situation they find themselves and fears Holda and her gifts even if he lacks the discursive capacities to convince Gretel of as much. He attempts to evoke the morals of the “Beautiful Child” fairy tale to dissuade Gretel, but his sister, fully caught up in the milieu of the tale itself through her discovery of her newfound powers, is unwilling to heed the lessons learned and retorts back that she’ll write her “own story.” The convergence between the fantastical and that which is not is made.

Gretel pushes her head down into Hansel’s frame, calling back to their piggish affirmation; but no pig noises come out. Instead, only rancor remains and Gretel, filled with the stuff, decides to get rid Hansel.

The camera shakes and tracks on Gretel as she drags Hansel out of the house, and the score gains additional urgent layers which augment the tension. They move towards the forests surrounding the triangular house; the woods are lit in a bright red haze that pops up and threatens to swallow the unaware within its hellish luminescence. Gretel walks back and leaves her brother, a child with no otherworldly gifts, to fend for himself.

He looks and the silhouette of a mysterious figure appears within the rouge haze, whispering “Follow me.”

We cut to his face, caught in the trance, and then cut to another wide shot which shows him being ferried by the silhouette figured into the haze before the trees completely cover their presence. Hans is gone (or in chess terms, the piece of Hans has been taken) now having seen his first witchy vision, unable to handle the pressure without his sister (the queen) to protect him.

The form reveals itself when we cut from this disappearance act to Gretel waking up in her bed once more, wrapping the sequence within the formal dress-up of a dream itself, one that now proceeds from life without any need for the artifice of sleeping. Gretel tries to reassure herself but sees only the cat, the sign of the witch, sitting on Hansel’s bed. She doubts the veracity of the visions, feeling that she would never, despite possessing the desire, actually get rid of Hansel in such a cruel manner; there’s now a discrepancy between her subjective perception of the world and the depiction of the world as experienced by us even.

She attempts to find Hansel, traversing the kitchen area which is lit in the deep, cool blues that operate in sharp contrast to the reds of the forest the evening before. She sees the chess board on the table and the weight of the symbol weighs heavily on her. She must find Hans, her piece, before he is taken forever.

She gazes out of the glassy window and sees a dark figure walking into the woods but is unable to ascertain their nature. Even when she goes out of the house, she is unable to find them, leaving us with a feeling of dread as the barriers of reality seem to have completely disappeared. The air is electric because anything can happen now.

D: The 4th dream-sequence, much like the 3rd, continues to experiment with its formal set-up. We start again on a shot of the triangular house with the moon even further completed with its arcs. The witch’s power is almost fully manifested.

Meanwhile, Gretel, now aware of the dangers of her situation, strategically plots to undermine her benefactor and rescue Hans. She feigns a need for the sleeping draught, drinks it, and then retches it all out. The artifice of sleeping has been invoked even though the sleeping itself will no longer be occurring, but that’s all that’s necessary for a trip to the dream world.

She gets ready to enter the small doorway, framed against its miniature nature in a way that hearkens to Alice in Wonderland (a fitting comparison given the tales’ synchronicities in depicting a young woman forced to reckon with a world that follows none of the rules that she’s aware of while bending her perception with supernatural phenomena). But as she heads down, she finds herself entering the impossibly wide door once again and she’s back to the basement for the second time.

This time, the childish victim present in the room is Hans and not the children desperate to remain unperceived. But Hans is unable to perceive his sister at all and sits in a corner staring at a wall. Even her attempts at a piggish affirmation do nothing to wake her brother from the sights that capture his attention.

Meanwhile, a liquid oozes out of the pipes; it both looks like blood and like the “illness” extracted from the pink-capped girl at the film’s start, a potent combination which sets up the reveal of the young Holda (Jessica De Gouw) who emerges from this chimeric pool.

We see her carry out different body parts from containers within the room and set them up on a table while Gretel watches in complete terror, bearing witness to the truth of the consumptive materials that have been the mainstay of her diet as of late. We cut to another wide and witness the power of this “queen” who can do anything as she transmutes the dismembered reminders of humanity into foods of a variety of sorts — another trading of humanity for a good from the beyond. Her show of prowess is accompanied by an increasingly intense aural element which makes the moment perversely spiritual.

We cut to an intimate shoulder shot of her as the music crescendos and then she opens her eyes and turns her gaze towards where Gretel was just hiding and the music evaporates, leaving only the tense waiting for the reveal in its wake. But instead of seeing Gretel in the corner where we never saw her leave from, we instead see her sleeping her bed once more.

Even though she did not “technically” go to sleep (due to vomiting the potion), her symbolic acceptance of the sleeping draught’s powers, an extension of the enchantress and her dominion, Gretel is forced into the realm of nightmares and returns from it in the same as she had previously despite there being no indication of sleep having actually occurred. Experience itself is rendered as a dream and the horrors of the other realm persist even in the waking hours.

Gretel’s words confirm the same: “It didn’t matter anymore if I dreamt it or really lived it. The horror of what I had seen under the house was proof of what I already knew.” The explicit identification of this oneiric chamber being “under the house”, the basement, there’s a geographical connotation with Freud’s idea of the id, the realm of repressed desire. This mapping of Freud’s registers would then leave the house as the ego (fitting, due to idea of players playing out a game to determine their own path and this setting being the primary location where such strategic posturing takes place) and the forest as the superego, it’s call pre-determining and couching everything within it (both in the way that it determines the nature of man-made activities like labor (woodcutting) and the manner in which it’s tied to the supernatural which represents the other half of the equation).

Psychoanalytic reading aside, the form of the film has effectively demonstrated the transformation of reality to the nightmare and reconfigured the nature of the battlefield as well: now the game will be played with knowledge of all the different levels, as bluffs and deceitful gambits become the tools of war.

E: The 5th dream- sequence is the pay-off to the exploration of the way that dream material re-forges reality into the thing of legend and builds upon (nearly) every formal decision made up to the scene.

We start with the players making their penultimate moves on the board. Holda leaves the room because “nature” calls out to her; there is an authority beyond her and the realm of nature, the trees and forests abound, become bearer of the supernatural.

The two players quickly move while the other is away from them. A handheld tracking shot on Holda follows her as she enters the forest, digs a hole, and vomits into it, turning into her younger form, and then going to touch dolls attached to a tree. Her action, unexplained by any dialogue, relies solely on images previously built on in order to convey meaning: the hole (that which hides), the act of retching (throwing up children, the reversal of consumption, the removal of “illness”), the youthful turn (youth being the site of possibility).

She’s gearing up for the final confrontation with her pupil-to-be and is finishing of all the necessary preparations to begin the conversion process. Han’s sacrifice being pivotal to the resolution of this ritual is all but spelled out. He will have to be eaten so that Gretel can be rid of that same kernel of humanity that Holda has given up; humanity must become fungible, no longer inviolable, as people turn into creatures for slaughter meant for consumption.

While she prepares for the cannibalistic carnage, Gretel desperately searches through the recipe book to find a way to stop Holda in her tracks.

The two players reconvene in the kitchen, the site of eating now turned battlefield. The camera holds on Holda without revealing her face, daring us to guess whether or not the seemingly older woman is here in her younger form, a more explicit declaration of war, or is in her normal form, a deceptive way to stall out Gretel. We pause on the young girl’s face and wait with baited breath, but a cut to a wide-shot reveals that Holda is sticking with her deceit; the terms of the battle still must be hashed out before the endgame.

The set-up tells us that it is Hansel that is on the offensive; she is framed against the red glass-pane, an evocation of the supernatural red haze which entranced and captured Hansel; she is the one getting ready to use the supernatural against her aggressor.

The conversation turns to the costs of becoming an enchantress. Holda condemns men and their ways before explaining that her vulnerability is that “which has taken a part” of her, a metaphor which poetically confirms the “missing piece” is one’s tie to humanity; Hansel and the manner in which he forces Gretel into a maternal role, a confirmation of her submission to the rules of “man”, must be severed in order for Gretel to move past “humanity” into the otherworld, a move which would free her from the gender roles that she so desperately wishes to be rid of; this “poison”, sacrificed humanity, becomes an unholy communion that grants obscene pleasure.

Holda consummates this ideal; she picks up food from the table, shaped and held like a person’s finger, and then consumes it with no abandon, ferociously chowing into it and then, in a grand gesture, she pulls out an formidable ponytail, starting as a strand, from her mouth, thereby revealing the truth behind the food; the dream show was merely the warning shot and now Holda wants Gretel to know that there’s no hidden information; the former knows what the latter knows even as the latter tries to hide it.

With the truth revealed, Holda toasts to youth and consumes the concoction Gretel brewed earlier, a sleep draught like the ones that Holda made earlier. But the younger witch’s plan is seen through and Holda scoffs at the attempt.

Then, she flips the script and turns Gretel into the dreamer once more, casting a spell through her hands; her shoved palm faces towards the audience as well, taking us under the fairy tale’s skin into its murky origins: the truth behind the “Beautiful Child” will be revealed.

This new field of battle is a psychic amalgamation of the different existential vantage points presented thus far: fairy tale, reality, dream. Gretel walks through this rendition of someone else’s past like a dream, a n alternative vision to a fairy tale which she thought she knew by heart because of the way it is embedded in her psyche; the opening narration becomes complicated as we realize that it was Holda telling us a more sanitized tale the entire time (a miniature Rashomon effect applied to the structure of the fairy tale and its moralizing); this was no innocent fable but was a self-serving narrative using the normative status of fairy tales as an cloak by which to disguise itself, the big bad wolf in the guise of the kindly grandmother.

Gretel is made to bear witness to the reality of veracity of the tale she thought she knew and sees the townspeople reckon with the reality of the pink-capped child, one who is revealed to be Holda’s daughter. This revelation completely shifts the schema of the film’s power relations: the pink-capped girl in the dream sequences was not Holda transforming but something much worse. The whispers from the first dream sequence play out hauntingly in the back of the mind: “My mother, she killed me. My mother, she ate me.”

Holda’s very act of narration is thus rendered into an act of consumption par excellence: she has not only consumed the protagonist of the tale, one whose corpse she utilizes as a way to endear herself to children, but has consumed the reality of the situation itself and turned it into fable as a lure, a moralistic tale told by a seemingly kind old woman to lure in children to turn into foodstuff. It’s no wonder then that the children trapped in the mirrors desperately reached out to Gretel before she made contact with the slain avatar of the grand narrative circumscribing her life: it was all a deceit meant to ensnare her.

After being banished, the girl, encased within the trees, sends an offer to her mother, flanked by trees on both sides, to teach the ways of magic. The path afforded by nature, the world of the supernatural, serves a powerful motivator and reunites Holda and her daughter. But the cost, one that Holda herself brought up at the dinner table before this nightmarish break occurred, is that tie to humanity.

We watch a wide-shot of the house and understand without need for any other visualization, the horrific sacrifice Holda makes as blood-red plumes of smoke billow out of the chimney. Her murderous revelations, both of the way she consumed her own children and took on the visage of a kind, weak old woman to lure more prey in, have Gretel in shock.

A dissolve from a hole, the site of light into the basement of depravity, to the triangular house, bring the commentary on the original tale full circle.

Gretel is transported once more to the basement, her third visit to the room of darkness (the id manifest). Her hands are tied to the table and there’s a plate in front of her.

Holda walks the room and indicates that Hans is ready to be served. Gretel will be forced to take part in this twisted sacrament. The need for disguises has disappeared and Holda turns to her youthful form and proceeds to set the room.

A curtain moves through her will and reveals a ladder, a flame, and Hans hidden in the corner of the room once more. He is possessed to walk to his sister and give his farewells. Gretel speaks healing words to him but there’s no effect.

The two are framed with the fire and Holda standing between them, the machine that prevents the siblings from being together. Gretel moves his head forward along with his sister and their heads, cast in silhouette, perfectly cover this impediment as they squeal at each other one final time affirming the bond between them, a tapestry built of family and humanity, in spite of the terrors.

Gretel refuses to lose and musters the might of her will to move the staff to do her bidding. Holda is distracted by the ritual process and is sure of herself, so she heeds no attention to this magical attack waiting to happen.

But when the staff finally moves, confirming Gretel’s check-mate is ready, Holda can only look passively at the twist in fate and comments: “What a world”, an understated response which signifies just how truly unready she was for Gretel’s development and steadfast desire to stay her own course regardless of which mentor’s prescriptions lay in front of her.

Holda is beheaded, like the vision of her daughter so many moons ago, and the ceremony stops as Holda’s corpse burns in the chilling, blue flames. This eternal night is finally over and Gretel, solitary denizen of the world of nature, that realm of the supernatural beyond which rides the plane of dreams, is able to return us back to the artifice of reality.

The two meet the next day after Gretel wakes up, the sleep having ended, and his older sister, stroking the cat, the representative of the enchantress, has a newfound confidence in her manner of speaking and decorum.

She has affirmed her new role and willingly lets Hansel take that un-nameable part of her, the humanity rendered in their relationship, with him as a gift of their times. The two must finally depart and go towards their own stories.

A dissolve marks this development, showing Gretel walking towards her home in the forest while Hans re-enters his childhood home, his mother now missing. He walks towards the axe left in the table, the sign of their exile and the symbol of his role, and takes it out confidently, exhibiting a strength which he did not yet have at Holda’s.

A tracking shot follows Gretel as she takes control of her destiny in the woods. The children come out from behind the trees, freed from their enslavement at the hands of Holda. An overhead shot captures the different paths these children take, as the children depart one way while Gretel continues forward to build something new.

An electrical harmony, an interlude which played earlier when Gretel first demonstrated her oneness with nature when she lifted the tree, takes acoustic precedence as she continues down this path. There’s an air of hope.

But the music darkens as Gretel’s hands turn black like Holda’s and we cut to a lower-angle shot of Greta, subsumed by the trees around her, and are left hanging with the juxtaposition of the ominous turn and her newfound resolution, a confident assertion of everlasting courage. The fairy tale has ended (both within the dramaturgy and in relation to the adaptation itself in reference to its source material), but this filmic Gretel, a character in her own right, is now at the start of her own tale, a narrative whose identity we don’t know, a story whose nature will be up to her to carve out.

This capper reveals the brilliant conceit of the narrative layering: in the same manner we learn that the fairy tale of the “Brilliant child” is distinct from the realty underpinning we it, we are given the space to question the origins of the original tale of Hansel and Gretel and treat this adaptation as a reality, one whose focus on femininity and exploration may have been pushed in due to the grammar of the fairy tale structure rendering its posturing on agencies (especially in relation to gender roles) inert. By opening up the interpretative space, Perkins calls us to question how the nature of story-telling itself obfuscates and dresses up meanings and ideals in innocent metaphors that trade in nuance for clear-cut lessons to keep persons in place.