Hansel & Gretel

A man crashes his car at night and wakes in a forest. A girl with a lantern finds him and takes him to her house. The house is large, warm and decorated, and there are three children in it. The table is laid, sweets appear, everything looks perfect. In the morning he wants to leave but cannot get out of the forest; whichever way he walks he comes back to the same house. The children want him to stay. Yim Pil-sung directs. The title refers to the Grimm tale, but the plot does not follow it. What the narrative inverts is this: in the tale the children are in danger, here the danger comes from the children. Yet the film does not build them as monsters; once what happened to them emerges the view changes entirely. The design of the house is the strongest thing in it: excessively coloured, excessively decorated and deliberately artificial. The visual language comes from the illustration of a storybook. The subject is abuse and abandonment, and treating those matters in the form of a fairy tale is unusual in Korean cinema. Its weakness is length; it runs close to two hours and the middle repeats a cycle of attempted escapes. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean thrillers and dark fairy tale adaptations. Who it is not for: it is slow for anyone expecting horror, the subject is uncomfortable, and the ending shifts the emotional register sharply.