So, have you seen the director's debut film The Blackcoat’s Daughter (or February or The Daughter of Evil - this one's known by many names)?. While Pretty Thing is still more or less good, I think Perkins has grown worse with every film and his debut is easily his best.
Whoa whoa whoa! Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
I was probably the most vocal proponent of
Blackcoat's Daughter on the previously deceased blog, so some folks know how I feel about it, andd there's slightly better than a non-zero chance of it making the list here
and I can go into more detail then. That's a long way to say that I agree.
I'm a big fan of Oz Perkins so far, but I would agree that
Gretel & Hansel was lacking. I would like to believe that this is due to studio interference, although I have no information to back that up. The film's first half is such a lovely somnambulant mix of rich mood and archetypal gothic imagery that the third act feels like an entirely different film, like one where some exec said, "We got to wrap this up under 90 minutes, so we're going to a lot of blood, fire and screaming. It doesn't have to make sense, the kids don't care about that", etc etc. Maybe I'm wrong and they really did just run out of ideas, money, whatever.