HANSEL & GRETEL (Yim Pil-sung). 117 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (March 27). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNN
I love a good fairy tale. This particular imaginative riff on the classic Brothers Grimm story delivers quiet supernatural and psychological chills and stands as an unassuming testament to the enduring power of the genre.
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A young travelling salesman, upset over his wife’s pregnancy and dazed after a car crash, arrives at a cottage in the woods filled with toys, the home of a loving family. But things get tense when he can’t find his way out of the woods, the grown-ups have disappeared and the three children want him to stay forever. Things get stranger when an over-friendly deacon and his thieving girlfriend show up.
Park Hee-soon stands out as the deacon, with a happy creepiness reminiscent of Christopher Walken. The rest of the cast is adequate.
Korean movies don’t usually enjoy big budgets, so the visuals and effects are low-tech and the scary bits soft, but its plain style lends the film a weight that more candy-coated efforts don’t always achieve, and the story delivers effective chills on both the supernatural and psychological level.
