I made the deliberate choice not to watch or review Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (2025), nor will I be covering Lilo & Stitch (2025) or any other Disney live-action remake in the future. The experiment has repeatedly failed, I’ve written the same review too many times, I’ve had enough. But what’s this? A competing Snow White movie from independent filmmakers? And it was locally made in the Pacific Northwest? And it’s screening here in Portland?! Hot damn! What have we got?
(DISCLOSURE: The film was made in the Seattle/Tacoma area, which isn’t exactly my neck of the woods. To my knowledge, I don’t think I’ve ever met or worked with anyone in the cast or crew.)
Well, as the title suggests, The Death of Snow White is a dark, gritty, gore-and-tits reimagining of the classic story. The obvious point of comparison would be Blood and Honey and the ensuing wave of cheap indie horror adaptations of Disney-branded public domain properties. But this one hits differently.
Yes, I know I just lumped this movie in with the Disney remake, but this is not the first time we’ve seen competing Snow White movies: Back in 2012, Mirror Mirror opened opposite Snow White and the Huntsman (a battle nobody won), and Disney had nothing to do with either one. Snow White (second only to Cinderella, maybe) is the all-time definitive fairy tale, an archetypal legend. This isn’t like Winnie the Pooh or Popeye, this is more like Robin Hood or King Arthur, something that transcends Disney.
The point being that Snow White is so foundational, adapted so many times into so many different media, anyone can get away with making a new Snow White film that stands on its own with no connection to Disney. This isn’t something that got made just because a copyright lapsed, people have been telling this story for ages and they’ll keep on telling it long after we’re dead. And really, it doesn’t matter that somebody else recently made their own take, nobody will remember or care about that this time next year.
Moreover, Blood and Honey and its peers made a point of perverting childhood classics that had no room for any kind of slasher cinema tomfoolery. By contrast, Snow White is quite literally some Brothers Grimm shit. We’ve known for ages that the Evil Queen was a narcissistic psychopath and she had no reason to call for the heart of her stepdaughter. Not to mention the squicky sexual implications of Snow White sharing a house with seven strangers and the Prince kissing her while she was sleeping. Hell, the original Disney film itself was packed with all sorts of fucked-up imagery.
Put another way, depicting Winnie the Pooh or Mickey Mouse as bloodthirsty monsters feels like a desecration of childhood itself. Depicting the Evil Queen and the Huntsman as bloodthirsty monsters feels perfectly sensible.
With all of this in mind, I was happy to give The Death of Snow White a shot. Especially since it’s such a rare pleasure to support local indie filmmakers whenever I can. And what we got was, um… well, it was more than a little frustrating.
To be clear, there’s a lot to like about this movie. First and foremost, I have to stress emphatically that despite all the R-rated trappings, this is still very much a Snow White story. The plot follows all the familiar contours of the tale we all know and love, but with some remarkably clever updates. This is a retelling in which Snow White herself is named for actual snow, a more recent addition to the folklore as a response to the archaic and racist notion of whiteness as beauty. Elsewhere, we get a sensible explanation for why Snow White eats the apple. The prince’s wake-up kiss gets a fantastic new overhaul. And that bit about the huntsman delivering a pig’s heart instead of Snow White’s was repositioned and repurposed to ingenious effect.
Even so, it’s worth remembering that this was made to be a horror fantasy picture. But we can’t have any major characters getting killed off or seriously injured until the third act at least. Thus the film brings in a steady stream of villagers, soldiers, forest monsters, and comic relief sidekicks to get brutally slain throughout the runtime. Though we do get a spectacularly bloody kill by the forest monsters (it’s not exactly clear what they are — humanoid trees of some kind?), most of the carnage goes into showcasing the villainy of the Evil Queen (Chelsea Edmundson, with Meredith Binder playing her crone form). We’ve got everything from her henchmen killing people to the queen throwing lethal magic around (she is a witch, after all) to beautiful young women getting carved up so she can appropriate their body parts and bathe in their blood.
(Side note: The Queen’s beautiful and hapless handmaidens are played by Tabitha Bastien, Amy DiLorenzo, Leona Britt, Hanna Morrison, and Olivia Laurimore. We’ve also got Hailey Stubblefield, Lydia Pearl Pentz, and Holland Stull as Snow White’s three beloved friends, two of whom get killed by the Evil Queen. And this is still only a partial list of the total body count. That’s how bloodthirsty this particular queen literally is.)
Most of the body horror in this picture is devoted to the Evil Queen’s various surgeries and treatments. (And the leeches. Can’t forget the leeches.) I can appreciate a depiction of the Evil Queen that’s made into a scathing satire of feminine beauty standards, and this one takes it to a nauseating level. And anyway, this is the Evil Queen — of course she has to be over-the-top self-centered evil, played as arch as possible, with an irrational jealousy of Snow White and psychotic obsession with immaculate beauty. Edmundson plays all of that with diabolically sexy aplomb.
And what about the magic mirror? Well, this time we get three naked beautiful women wearing ornate masks and speaking in deep growling voices. (I’m sorry I can’t confirm the names of the actors, but I’d go out on a limb and guess that Edmundson herself is playing at least one of them, maybe even all of them.) In effect, when the Evil Queen looks in the mirror, she’s being taunted and guided by a dark and twisted vision of otherworldly beauty, something she could never achieve if she burned down the whole world trying. It’s a neat touch.
Moving on, there’s the Prince, here played by Tristen Nokes. This depiction of the character strikes a great many fine balances. He’s handsome, charming, dashing, everything a fairy tale prince should be, and yet he’s depicted with just enough personality and charisma that he doesn’t blend into the background or come off as one-dimensionally boring. With all due credit to Nokes’ performance, a lot of that has to do with the Prince’s interactions with the other characters.
The Prince manages the search party to look for Snow White in the dark forest, so we get to see his princely leadership abilities in a way that doesn’t take away too much plot agency from Snow herself. Conversely, we see his inconsistent inability to manage the dwarves (more on them later), and it’s quite refreshing to watch the archetypal fairy tale prince get so flustered and outmaneuvered. It helps to give the Prince a bit of personality.
On the other hand, the Prince also gets a couple of comic relief sidekicks played by Milo Mechem-Miller and Christopher Burnside. I didn’t care for them nearly as much. We already had an abundance of comic relief in this picture and these two don’t really serve much of any purpose except to be unfunny sounding boards for the other characters.
Most importantly, the Prince comes off as an independent character with his own agency in the story, but not to such an extent that he overshadows Snow White herself (here played by Sanae Loutsis). This is a retelling in which the Prince is there to prop up the story of Snow White and not the other way around, something we desperately needed. I might further add that the Prince/Snow White interplay is solid, with some genuinely whip-smart dialogue and sizzling chemistry between them.
These filmmakers clearly understood how important this core relationship was, and they put some admirable effort into selling this instant romance. They even threw in a few lines establishing that Snow White and the Prince have known each other for years and they’ve both been dragging their feet in taking the next step, a simple and sensible measure to ensure this isn’t a paper-thin case of love at first sight. Impressive stuff.
Which brings me to the single greatest accomplishment of the entire movie: Its depiction of Snow White herself. Imagine my relief to find that this R-rated send-up didn’t turn the title character into a brainless scantily-clad floozy or a hardcore blood-soaked killer. (Though she does go through half the movie covered in blood…) Yes, the filmmakers do give Snow White some measure of agency and backbone and intelligence, and it’s all for the purpose of making her an embodiment of radical empathy.
While the movie around her is significantly darker and bloodier than we may be used to, the character herself is still the Snow White we all know and love. She’s kind and generous and compassionate, even if she is a little naive at times. She is the people’s princess, a figurehead and a role model for the kingdom precisely because she can be compassionate and graceful in such a dark, violent, ruthless world. Sure, it makes a difference that she’s royalty living in a castle, but that doesn’t count for much when her evil stepmother has all the power and Snow White is clearly and repeatedly shown using her own wealth and privilege to lift up the less fortunate. I might further add that the Magic Mirror keeps making a huge deal about how Snow White’s inner radiance will always be more beautiful than the Evil Queen could ever be.
Loutsis puts on a powerhouse lead performance. In her hands, Snow White demonstrates that simply being sincere and compassionate is a brave and beautiful act of defiance in an ugly and soulless world. In other words, she’s emblematic of the film as a whole. Magnificent work.
But then we get to the dwarves. This is where things start to break down.
In this retelling, the dwarves were loyal servants of Snow White’s parents, banished to the Dark Forest when the Evil Queen came to power. All well and good. And we’ve got actual little people — namely Risa Mei, Ali Chapman, Jeremy Hallam, Dillon Moore, Michael De Santo II, and Colin Miller — playing the dwarves, which is fantastic. And they’re not exclusively male, which is even better.
But wait a minute. If you’re counting, those were only six dwarves. The seventh — played by Eric Pope — is in fact a giant. For reasons the characters outright refuse to explain. And come to think of it, some of the line deliveries from a few of the smaller actors were noticeably flat.
Now, such problems would typically be laid at the feet of the director, and that may indeed have been a factor here. But more likely, the production wanted to find seven talented actors of short stature, and this was the best the production could get with the limited resources available. As with everything else about this movie, the end result is functional and enjoyable, even if the limitations are glaringly obvious.
I’m sorry, I hate to harp on about the budgetary limitations of a shoestring indie picture, but it’s heartbreakingly difficult to ignore the stone walls that are clearly plastic. Even more so when the entire first act is set in what’s obviously a renaissance faire. Sure, it makes for a passable fairy tale fantasy kingdom, but maybe that shot of the portable outdoor aerial rig was a little much?
Predictably, the lack of budget is an unavoidably huge problem when it comes to the kills and effects. Don’t get me wrong, the gore effects that we do get look marvelous, and the magic effects look surprisingly good. But for every effects shot in this movie that delivers on its full potential, there’s at least five other effects we never get to see because the camera’s a little too close and it cuts away a little too quickly. Again, I’m sorry I have to make such a big deal out of the lack of budget, but there are simply too many painfully obvious blank spaces where a gut-churning kill or a mind-blowing transformation effect should be.
The Death of Snow White is a film whose reach far exceeded its grasp. And for a film made by a plucky crew of independent filmmakers, I mean that as a compliment. I can appreciate the talent, the ambition, and the attention that went into crafting a Snow White for a modern world that’s at once so ruthless and yet so sensitive to women and to marginalized demographics. It sucks that we only got maybe a third of the blood and effects that the filmmakers envisioned, but that third does look pretty damn good. And if it means we get a Snow White movie in which the blood and guts are a condiment rather than the entree, that’s probably for the best.
In all other regards, the movie had everything it needed. The dialogue is solid. The plot is a bit rushed and disjointed, but still functional. The lead actors — most especially Sanae Loutsis and Chelsea Edmundson — are phenomenal, and the supporting actors (even the weaker ones) all serve their purpose well. Most importantly, what we’ve got here is a children’s story for a grown-up audience, delivered in a way that never feels patronizing or condescending. It’s all the important themes and ideas of the classic story, cleverly updated for modern times and sensibilities without losing what made the original story so timeless.
I’d absolutely recommend this movie, but with adjusted expectations. You’re not getting a polished work of Hollywood cinema. You’re not getting much in the way of innovative kills. You’re not getting a movie that goes as far over-the-top as the filmmakers themselves were clearly aiming for. But if you want a fun fantasy horror that effectively balances gratuitous horror schlock with uplifting themes, packaged in an old familiar story with new and thoughtful twists, that’s what you’re getting.
The film is still in limited release, so keep an eye on their website and all the social media pages to learn about upcoming showtimes. Send the producers an e-mail to request a showing near you, and let them know who sent you.