When Eun-soo gets lost in a country road, he meets a mysterious girl and is led to her fairytale ike house in the middle of the forest. There, Eun-soo is trapped with the girl and her siblings who never age. Eun-soo finally discovers a way out which is written on a fairy tale book. But the book tells a story of none other than himself!
Hansel and Gretel, 韩塞尔与葛雷特, 惊骇糖果屋, 鬼怪密林, 魔幻谜林, 헨젤과그레텔, Hansel et Gretel, 헨젤과 그레텔, Az erdő foglyai, עמי ותמי, Hansel y Gretel, Jaś i Małgosia, Гензель и Гретель, 驚駭糖果屋, ヘンゼルとグレーテル
Canada14A 
South Korea12 
JapanPG12 
IrelandG 
France Canada France Ireland Japan South Korea 
it actually might be a tragedy to have such a great setup and then do absolutely nothing interesting with it :(
This is a delightfully dark fairytale of a Christmas horror movie even if that fairytale is not the one from the title, which is kinda odd, but it does at least go with the overall vibe.
I saw this when it first came out. I think it was on Netflix when they first started streaming and I loved it but never saw it again but also never forgot it. I did forget that it has a Christmas themed backstory until I saw that it is listed on Screambox’s holiday horror section.
The set pieces are really fun and the story is really twisted. Love the contrast of the fairytale-esque interior design to the dark story and the overall darkness and…
"If I follow the directions you give me, I can surely leave the forest, right?"
- "That's why you should've marked your way with breadcrumbs."
Well, hi there.
I've been interested in this movie for a while because it sounded like such an interesting take on Hänsel & Gretel.
Well and for no specific reason my curiosity got the best of me.
A young man named Eunsoo gets lost in the woods. He is found by a young girl who leads him to her family's fairytale house. But something is strange and Eunsoo doesn't seem to be able to leave..
Doesn't help that Jin Jihee plays one of the kids and everytime I see her in something she's playing a spoiled…
A super loose riff on the fairytale, probably enough of a drift to seperate it completely from the title except that the actual book features heavily. Didn’t need to though, it coulda been literally anything.
The horror elements are technically there but not in a way that met what I wanted. It looks good and the characters are likeable but there’s no scares, haunting tension, transgression, grit, or energy. It’s really tidy and slick and comes off feeling formulaic despite its originality and how busy the story is. There’s lots of movement but instead of feeling chaotic it feels scattered. It’s hard to be invested when the elements keep changing.
Like bread crumbs lost to the birds. Ba dum tss.
I woulda loved a gnarly old witch and a gingerbread house.
Pick Your Poison 2025
Day 20: Stay Out of the Woods
Forests and wilderness
Watched during my Summer of J-Horror II.
I had to sleep on this review because I just...didn't have a lot to say about it. Which is a shame, I like the core idea, and the opening act is interesting. There are some nice, dreamy visuals and fantastical elements that evoke the likes of Del Toro's films, but it runs longer than felt necessary, and becomes more melodramatic and cheesy with the overt supernatural stuff. The concept is a neat spin on the titular story, but in the middle it goes really deep into this exposition bit where everything is explained in fairy tale format, which felt kind of insulting considering the plot isn't that hard to follow. It also bears a lot of similarities to a particular, classic Twilight Zone episode, but never feels quite as threatening as that either. It's pretty good in the end, but a little disappointing too.
Yim Pil-sung (Antarctic Journal) inverts the classic Grimm fairy tale for a fantasy horror film that has more in common with the Twilight Zone episode “It's a Good Life” (the one which was remade in The Movie by Joe Dante).
While arguing with his pregnant girlfriend, Lee Eun-soo (Chun Jung-myung) has a serious car accident. Losing sight of the road, Lee staggers into the forest before discovering a family in the woods, whose parents (Jang Young-nam & Kim Kyeong-ik) soon leave him to look after their three children (Shim Eun-kyung, Eun Won-jae, and Jin Ji-hee). Something about the place seems off, but as Lee becomes more desperate to re-join the adult world, the house becomes a beckon for other lost travellers…
I loved this one so much more than I realized I was going to. I mean, I love a dark fairytale, but this does such a great job messing with your expectations throughout the film. And the aesthetics are just fantastic. I wanted to eat their cupcake and marshmallow breakfast as well!
Eun-soo is a dude who has a car accident on what we later learn is a road that’s been cursed with a lot of misfortune. Luckily, there is a young girl there to guide him to her home for respite. That’s when things start to get a bit sinister.
The Koreans certainly know how to twist you around when it comes to horror and thrillers. Hansel and Gretel…
What a creepy, and ultimately sad, dark-fantasy world has been created here. Very nice discovery.
Fourteenth film of Hooptober 5.0
5th of 6 countries: South Korea
If this was released tomorrow, with an American production and let's say... A24 as its distributor, people would be all over this. There would tons of think-pieces from film bros about this one. Yet, it's not from the US, but from South Korea, hence... pretty much nobody knows about this one sadly. That's a damn shame since this one is good; real good. It nails the feeling of a modern and dark fairy tale. It has the look of a fairy tale, the setting too; everything. I wouldn't call this scary by any means, but it's quite disturbing and has a terrific mysterious feeling to it. The performances from…
Eun-Soo wraps his car round a tree on a woodland road, wounded and in shock, he pulls himself from the wreckage and follows a young girl through the dark forest after she promises to help him, but who is the girl, where are they going and once he gets there, will he ever be able to leave?
A grim, but colourfully rendered fairy tale that owes more to the excellent Twilight Zone episode ‘It's a Good Life' than the actual story of Hansel and Gretel. The treatment of storytelling as a theme and a way to develop the plot was really interesting, but the children really didn't exude the ominously dark power that seemed to govern their world within the forest and frighten their captives into obeying their childish whims, and this completely undermined Eun-Soo's ordeal and made, what would have been the more thrilling story elements, seem a bit dull.
A little Twilight Zone, a little Wonderland, a little fae realm, a little Black Moon, the film is also only a little Hansel & Gretel, displaying its connections lightly and taking on more of a twisted re-imagining than a direct interpretation. And South Korea has done it yet again with the emotional punches. This is the eighth film I've seen from the country, and every single one of them has gotten to me. I no longer think I'm just picking ones that are effective and think they on the whole output some serious business, no matter which genre.
The parallels with Black Moon here really got my mind whirling at the beginning of the film. There's a car crash, the protagonist…
Yim Pil-sung’s dark fantasy-horror is a richly textured enigma out of South Korea. A fairy-tale crossroads of K-horror, Grimm, Del Toro, and Serling (specifically one very famous Twilight Zone episode), whose storybook vibrancy gradually reveals an otherworldly and tragic eeriness. Best to go into this knowing as little as possible. Just know that this is a disturbing and evocative tale that warps fairy-tale childhood fears into adult unease, imbued with a enrapturing atmosphere that’s equally whimsical and nightmarish.
I’m really surprised Hansel & Gretel 2007 isn’t talked about more. It’s unabashedly stylish, deliberately topsy-turvy, weird, and creepy. It touches on themes of parenthood and lost innocence. And there’s an impactful human core behind the Grimm horror. Arguably too long and too backloaded with exposition, but the journey and surreal payoff was worth the watch
