Of Curses, Cows, and Magic Beans: My Review of Into The Woods

A look at the 2014 musical movie!

Mar 12, 2026

Hello, friends, and welcome back to The Kindness Cafe! Today, I’m talking about the 2014 musical movie Into The Woods (based off of Stephen Sondheim’s 1982 musical). In this post, I’ll discuss the fairytales mentioned, the basic plot and characters, and my overall review of the movie!

Content Warning:⚠️This content is for 13+⚠️ While the movie is rated PG, I found this movie quite dark and felt that it was bordering on PG-13. It includes violence, creepy characters, light language, infidelity, death, and lots of miscommunication. If you’re highly sensitive, you may want to stop at the halfway point of the movie.

The Fairy Tales:

Into The Woods includes multiple fairytales from the Brothers Grimm, who were famous writers and collectors of a variety of tales from Germany. The movie features the title characters Little Red Riding Hood, Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, as well as the Witch from Rapunzel and two royal princes. The characters that tie it all together – the Baker and his wife — are new characters made for the story.

The Plot:

The movie starts with each character wishing for a change in their life: the Baker and his wife wish for a child, Jack needs money, Little Red Riding Hood wishes to go to her grandmother’s house, Cinderella wants to go to the festival, and so on and so forth.

The Baker and his wife are despairing about their bad luck at their bakery when a Witch shows up. She explains that there is a curse on their house and the only way to break it is to journey into the woods and retrieve four objects for her. They need to get:

the cow as white as milk,
the cape as red as blood,
the hair as yellow as corn,
and the slipper as pure as gold

in order to have a child. The Baker and his wife have no money, but they discover a sack of magic beans hidden in the cupboard, which they bring along with them.

The Baker and his wife venture into the woods, where they encounter Jack, a child who is trying to sell his cow, Milky White. When the two adults realize that Milky White is as white as milk, they trade the magic beans for the cow. This sets off a series of events that leads to chaos and eventually a happy ending…or so everyone thinks.

What I Thought:

Overall, I thought that this movie had a good premise with so much potential. The casting was phenomenal — some of my favorites included Meryl Streep (The Witch), Emily Blunt (The Baker’s Wife), Anna Kendrick (Cinderella), and Johnny Depp (The Wolf). I was also pleasantly surprised to see Lucy Punch as one of the stepsisters as she is also in one of my favorite shows, A Series of Unfortunate Events.

I also loved the costumes. It’s clear the attention to detail is present in every single piece of clothing. My favorite costume would have to be the Witch’s blue dress with puffed sleeves, which you can see below in the thumbnail. (It’s so flowy and pretty…)

The music delivers at pivotal points in the movie. I’m not sure if this is because the actors are fantastic singers or if the songs are phenomenal or both. One of my favorite songs was “Last Midnight”, a solo by Meryl Streep (The Witch), which I put below!

Unfortunately, I found the plot lacking. There are seven main characters and six more that support the plot, not to mention tertiary characters, which means that not every character got their due amount of screen time.

While I appreciated that the writing showed the Witch as a deep, complex villainess, that meant that we didn’t get enough of the Baker and his wife’s relationship. Cinderella’s character was written very well with the limited time she had, as well as Jack. I had a hard time rooting for Little Red Riding Hood when I knew nothing of her family or why she — a young child, maybe 10 to 12 years old — was forced to go into the woods alone. I was also discontented by the lack of Rapunzel in the movie, even though she had a tight connection to the Witch.

I was also disappointed with the sets. In the movie, the woods are thick and dense, which adds to the darkness of the film, but it’s impossible to tell one part of the woods from the other. It often felt like the characters were walking around in circles. Likewise, the houses and castles were very drab and lacked movement, which made them seem boring. The two places outside of the woods I appreciated were the waterfall during the song “Agony” and the steps of the palace where Cinderella becomes stuck (which were actually magnetic, which I found super cool!)

Overall, I believe this movie had promise, but I think the amount of characters crowding the story really pulled the plot down. I did love the casting so much, though!

If you’ve seen it, what do you think about Into The Woods? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll give it a try? Let me know in the comments below!

And if you like musicals, why not try these posts?