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Review

Director Alex van Warmerdam gleefully ventures into the shadowy, neo-gothic world of the Brothers Grimm with this post-modern twist on "Hansel and Gretel." Jacob and Maria are twentysomething siblings who live with their dour parents in some godforsaken corner of The Netherlands. Dad leads them off into the woods one night and abandons them, setting off a chain of events involving a vicious rottweiler, a farmer and his wife, a cow, a butcher's table and a wild escape from a meat locker, that is occasionally gruesome and often hilarious. The next thing you know young Jacob and Maria are off on a picaresque tour of the E.U., destination Spain, where a surreptitious note from their mother has instructed them to seek a long-lost uncle. Spain, of course, leads only to more misfortune, culminating in an over-the-top finale on the set of an old spaghetti western. Van Warmerdam seems to draw inspiration from the works of both Angela Carter ("The Bloody Chamber") and Ian McEwan ("The Comfort of Strangers") as he draws his characters into ever more gut-wrenching situations. And despite the pervasive sense of unease, the film never loses its edge of wicked black humor. Jacob Derwig and Halina Reijn (both rising stars of the Dutch film scene) have a tremendous deadpan chemistry that contributes to the film’s mischievous sensibilities.

 -- Eric Moore