Fairytales have been our escape, our parables and our dreams since we first heard them as children. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood; they’ve all been embedded in the collective unconscious. Time and again writers, directors and producers try to make them new. Normally, it’s a retelling with an added twist, a different perspective or new setting. In Joe Wright’s Hanna, he’s ripped pieces from several tales and put them together to form a whole new puzzle.
Our princess is Hanna, played by Saoirse Ronan, a mysterious girl with golden hair who lives in the woods with her father. She doesn’t sing as the woodland creatures gather around her though. Instead she hunts them.
This is a modern fairytale, told through a grimy lens.
Like many a Disney movie, the plot starts after the death of the mother, but that’s where the similarities tend to deviate. Instead of living the lonely princess life, Hanna has been trained as an assassin by her ex-CIA father. Isolated from the world, her knowledge has come from a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and a nightly reading of the encyclopedia – where she learns about music without ever having experienced it. But the time has come and Hanna’s father must let his daughter go. Like King Triton letting Arial out of the sea and into the world, Hanna is unleashed to explore the strange and wonderful things that civilization has to offer. But like Arial, Hanna is on a mission, not to find love and reclaim her voice, but to kill the evil witch, Marissa, so she can live freely.
Unlike most villains, Marissa doesn’t have to state her evil intent; it seeps out of her with every seemingly innocuous word and action, thus portraying the full depth of the character’s black soul in the way that only Cate Blanchett can do. Like Snow White and the Evil Queen, one cannot exist while the other lives. In many ways, Marissa is responsible for her own undoing, as the mystery of who/what Hannah is, is realized. Like the best stories, evil creates its own demise on the way to glory.
This dark fairytale thriller is not for everyone, certainly not the lazy viewer. It’s a film that makes you feel your way through to the conclusion and find the answers after you think about it. It doesn’t wrap everything up in a nice big bow. The director made sure it was all there, though – he just wants you to look for it. But no searching is needed to see the strength of his princess.
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