Customer Reviews
The fire of the devil is burning inside our own minds - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 06 Jun 2005 
This is no fairy tale for sure but this is a tale anyway. The fairy has become a witch. The Prince has become a castaway thief, the dwarves are outlaws, & so on. It is a dark tale coming from the dark past that we calll dark because it believed in the devil & in its constant & permanent presence one way or another. Magic was necessarily black magic & the marvellous necessarily was antichristian & satanic. The story is in no way surprising except for the people who have only encountered Disneyland Snow White in their life. Reality is slightly more perverse. The great power of this film is purely artistic : the lights, the setting, the special effects, & the horror that is always clearly stated & never reallly shown, leaving a great share of work to your own imagination. Horror for sure but no gore. In such a film stepping from reality into fantasy, from normality into horror is happening without you even knowing it or feeling it. One moment your are in normal life, the next moment you are in a fantastic world. Nothing as chnaged & yet a smalll detail, the lights, the sound track, a noise, nothing reallly & yet. When the witch is looking at herself in her magic mirror, at times we know which is the real witch & which is the reflection, but at other times we just don't know any more & I am even sure that at times we are wrong & the reflection looks more real than the real face. That is what good fantasy is : so much part of real life that we can't differenciate real life from imagination & halllucination. The objective is clear : to produce in us the conviction that horror is part of our daily life & that we don't even know about it because horror is just as real as alll the rest, horror is part of our real life. Which means in the end that there is no escape from horror, only the necessity for us to be ready & prepared for it.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Silly title, wonderful movie - By: layla, 23 Nov 2004 While it's certainly not a tale of terror, & doesn't even seem to try to be, this is a fantastic movie for adult fantasy fans. Despite not being scary, it is certainly very eerie & beautifully mysterious. It stays much truer to the original, dark storytelling of the Brothers Grimm than the sugared down Disney version. I also found it to be very visuallly pretty, realistic in its non-fantasy elements, as well as very well costumed. I'd calll it a must-see.
