| Hansel and Gretel | |
|---|---|
Poster for Hansel and Gretel (2007) |
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| Hangul | 헨젤과 그레텔 |
| RR | Heljelgwa geuretel |
| MR | Henjelgwa kŭret‘el |
| Directed by | Yim Pil-Sung[1] |
| Written by | Kim Min Suk |
| Starring | Cheon Jeong-myeong Eun Won-jae Shim Eun-kyeong Jin Ji-hye |
| Music by | Lee Byung-woo |
| Distributed by | CJ Entertainment |
| Release date(s) | December 27, 2007 |
| Country | South Korea |
| Language | Korean |
| Admissions | 140,455 |
Hansel and Gretel (헨젤과 그레텔) is a 2007 South Korean horror film.
Contents |
The scene is opened with pictures from a storybook that tell Hansel and Gretel's story, then the scene fades to black. The scene then shifts to Eunsu, a salesman, driving his car along Highway 69 while talking to his girlfriend (Haeyoung) on the phone. Apparently, Haeyoung is four weeks pregnant and telling him to come be by her side for the remainder of the pregnancy. But he tells her that his mother is ill and he had to visit. As they quarrel along the way, Eunsu accidentally hits a big rock and his car falls down the side of the road. He opened his eyes and realized that his car fell hours ago, and that he was "stranded" in a dark forest. He tried to keep awake as he walked in the woods, but soon fell unconscious. He opens his eyes again and finds light, and sees it is in a little girl's hand. The little girl helped him up, and as they were walking Eunsu asked what her name was, and she told him it was Younghee. He follows her into a big, neat house in the middle of the forest. The house's signboard reads "House of Happy Children".
On the terrace her parents are waiting with her two siblings, who are then introduced as Manbok, her older brother, and Jeongsun, her little sister. Their parents behave unusually, jiggling their feet and scratching their necks. The next day when Eunsu woke up, he saw many sweets on the table, and the children were following every move he made. He decides to leave, but came back into the house because the darkness was quickly approaching. As he tried to get out of the house again, he discovered that the parents were leaving, and they tell him to take care of the kids. He begins to wonder why Manbok is so full of anger, and why the children always watch the same, sadist TV show over and over, and he wonders about the creepy sound he hears in the attic every night.
Soon he found out from their mother, who was hiding in the attic, that she and her husband were not their real parents. Their car broke down on the same highway where Eunsu was stranded, and when they explored the woods, they met Jeongsun. She told him not to believe the children. The day after, it was snowing, and as Eunsu makes his way out for the third time, he meets Manbok and a couple walking towards the house. The husband was a deacon, who seemed very nice and got the children's sympathy, while his wife had a malicious aura about her. As Eunsu kept looking for clues, he realized that the meat they ate for lunch and dinner was actually the cooked body of the missing 'father',and his wife had now turned into a china doll. He also noticed that the deacon's wife had disappeared after blaming Jeongsun for stealing her ring. At night, he sees Manbok going into the woods. He goes to follow him, and makes a trail of breadcrumbs so he wouldn't get lost. He was surprised to learn that the deacon's wife had been turned into an oak tree.
Manbok finally stops in front of a mysterious door, leading into a room. Manbok put down the notebook that he and his sisters were working on throughout the movie. As he heads through the door, his face changes to an old man's face. When he leaves, Eunsu immediately goes into the room to find out what's going on. He looked over the notes in the notebook, and found out that the children were over thirty years old. Suddenly Younghee comes in, apparently sleepwalking, and as they talk, Eunsu looks at her face, which is now an old woman's face, which causes Eunsu to back off in shock, and he hits the bookcases in the room, which causes all the notes to fall off the shelves. As he reads the notes, Manbok narrates the story, revealing the reason why he wanted to get rid of the couple who used to be his 'parents'. While they were playing, Jeongsun accidentally stepped on shards of broken glass, and the husband did absolutely nothing, instead quarelling with his wife. This angers Manbok, so he uses his powers to cut the husband's fingers, and drops them into the boiling pan. Since then the couple became aware of his powers, and tried not to mess up, or they would end up dead.
Eunsu sees more of the childrens' drawings in the notebook, such as a woman with her legs and arms cut, a woman turned into an oak tree, a woman in a dress with red crayons being splattered on her face, and a man who was dressed like him laying on the grass beside the red flowers he had seen on his way out. He realizes the notebook pictured his own story, and he knew he'd better stop the kids before they got bored with him and murder him.
Meanwhile, Younghee went back to the house after hearing Byeon(the deacon) singing. Eunsu decides to go back too, and finds out Byeon is a leader of a religious cult who tried to kill the children,and he was holding Jeongsun hostage. He knocks Byeon out and asks the children what happened. As Younghee begins the story, the scene turns into a flashback.
The kids were living in an orphanage called "House of Happy Children". The caretaker was abusive, he raped the girls and beat up the boys. Manbok tried to save his friend Seungho from being beaten up for spilling the food they were eating, but he failed and his friend ended up being locked in a dark room. Younghee and Jeongsun once tried to run away, but then came back, ending in Younghee being taken into the caretaker's room, to save Jeongsun from being raped. One Christmas Eve, they wondered if Santa Claus would give them presents, because they thought they weren't very good that year. This conversation leads Manbok to activate his powers by blasting the TV, but he didn't realize until the next morning when Santa Claus did come, and told Manbok and his sisters that their dreams would come true if they really wanted and imagined it, and he gave them a Hansel and Gretel storybook. They believed they must follow the story, even the part where Gretel kills the evil witch, and they think they must do this to all bad adults. The three of them then see Seungho being forced to get in a sack, where he is beaten to death. Manbok feels that this must stop. He and his sisters sneak up to the locked room, and Manbok is amazed that he can unlock the door by just imagining it. They try to give candy to their friends inside, but soon realize that they are all dead. Unfortunately the caretaker found them and was going to burn them in the fireplace, but they had had enough. Manbok screamed (at the same time in the present, he screams when Byeon rises and tries to kill Eunsu), causing a whirlwind to kick up(in both the flashback and the present day) which throws the caretaker into the fireplace, and Byeon is thrown out of the house and stabbed to death.
The winds stop, and the children ask Eunsu to stay with them. But Eunsu tells them that his loved ones are out there. He suggests taking the children outside with him, but they refuse, saying adults will always be bad. Eunsu argued that if they kept doing what they were doing, they would be the bad adults too. Suddenly Younghee whispers "Burn the notebook, so you can get out of here.", and before Manbok can stop him, he does so. As the book slowly burned, Eunsu glanced at the children, who were crying. The screen fades to black.
Eunsu wakes up in the place where Younghee found him. He walks up the road and finds the cops, who tell him the tragic stories of Highway 69, and that they are amazed that he survived. One year later, on Christmas, Eunsu has married Haeyoung, and they have a baby boy. Haeyoung asks Eunsu to go buy milk. As he went out, he narrated about the story, wondering if it was real or if it was a dream. He has collected news clippings which show that Deacon Byeon was missing, so the seems to have been true. As he heads out, he finds a notebook-the same notebook that the children used. He is surprised, and as he leafs through the pages one by one, he finds them blank until the last page, which shows three children dressed like Manbok, Younghee, and Jeongsun all holding hands and smiling, meaning that they finally gave up and realized that they don't need parents to be a family. Eunsu looks out the window, and outside in the snow, Manbok, Younghee, and Jeongsun turn around and make their way back into the woods.
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