I watched a really good movie yesterday. A 2007 Korean release, titled 헨젤과 그레텔 (hen-jel-gwa geu-re-tel = Hansel and Gretel) is considered a horror film in genre terms, but it’s really a bit more (and less) than that.
Most of the amateur reviews of the movie (written in English, anyway) that I saw online seemed to harbor a fundamental misunderstanding of the film, stating either overtly or implicitly that it was an unfaithful adaptation of the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.”
The fact is, it’s not an adaptation at all. Rather, the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” might best be viewed as a protagonist (or antagonist) of the film. The film doesn’t tell the story “Hansel and Gretel” but instead tells a story about the story “Hansel and Gretel.” That makes it a sort of metafairytale. And everyone knows how I love all things meta. It’s not a reading of that story, but a completely new narrative about the reception of the text, in a postwar Korean cultural context.
I’ll leave plot summaries and all that to others. See imdb, for example. But I enjoyed the movie partly because it had me constantly wondering about to what extent the dreamlike (nightmarelike) events of the film could be read as a metaphor for some aspects of Korea’s relationship to the West and to its own history.
As an example, consider the fact that the physical book “Hansel and Gretel,” that wreaks such psychic havoc in the film, is brought to the children by a very western Santa Claus (santa haraboji) in the 1960’s, the era of the quasi-fascist westernizing dictatorship. He is clearly, in fact, just a Korean in a Santa suit. And decades later, the children, psychically wounded beyond belief when young (by the Korean War? by the dictatorship?) are living in a sort of self-regenerating fantasyland of material plenty and affective vacuum. “Adults” come and go, but the kids simply can’t move on.
These are just some notes, not meant to be pat answers or allegorical readings of the movie. And there are some things I don’t like about it – I’d have preferred, personally, if the causative links between their childhood abuse and current situation (established with flashbacks) had retained more of the antirationalist (surreal) character of the first half of the film. But perhaps that serves an important purpose, too.
Overall, it’s a coherent movie, perhaps a bit pat, psychologically, but full of the sort of small, spine-shuddering moments that good “scary movies” require but with very little gratuitous gore or meaningless jacks-in-the-boxes. The actors are amazing, especially the kids, and also that creepy born-again serial killer. Alleged serial killer, that is… he never gets to kill any serial in the movie – don’t worry, it’s not a slasher show. Although… several adults do die, including the nasty abusing guy that gets shoved in the oven, and several dysfunctional mother-figures. And what’s that about, anyway?
The cinematography is spectacular. All kinds of inanimate things become full participating characters: the forest, the house, the book, food, a television set. Like some novel full of oversignifiers by Gombrowicz.
