Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

I showed Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to my kids expecting a lovely afternoon. What I got instead was two wide-eyed children gripping the sofa cushions like they were preparing for impact. Job done, I suppose, if the job was traumatising the next generation.

Look, I know the reputation. I know people hold this one close to their hearts as a stone-cold classic, something magical and timeless that defined their childhoods. And I get it, I do. Gene Wilder is clearly a remarkable talent, and there are moments here where you can see exactly what the film is going for: that unsettling sweetness, the sense that wonder and menace are two sides of the same coin. But knowing what something is going for and actually enjoying it are two very different things. For me, Wilder's performance walks a line between whimsical and full-blown deranged, and it falls off that line more often than not. He's not charming. He's unnerving. The kids on screen look genuinely frightened of him, and honestly, I was a little too.

The whole film has the feeling of a fever dream that's gone badly wrong. The sets look like haunted school plays, all garish colours and wobbly construction, and not in a way that reads as charmingly lo-fi. It just looks cheap and strange. I've got time for weird, ambitious filmmaking on a budget. I've seen Fantastic Planet and loved every bizarre frame of it. But that film uses its strangeness with purpose and confidence. This one feels like it stumbled into its own oddness and then couldn't find the exit.

Then there are the Oompa Loompas. I don't know what else to say about them except that they are, without question, nightmare fuel. The songs they sing are grating in a way I found hard to shake. There's a smugness to the musical numbers, a wagging finger dressed up in a jaunty tune, and it wore on me quickly. By the third or fourth one I was checking how much runtime was left.

The film does share some DNA with Alice in Wonderland, that same idea of a child dropped into a world run by adults who are either indifferent or actively hostile, where the rules keep shifting and nobody explains anything. But Disney's version of that story at least had warmth around the edges. Here, the warmth is missing. What's left is all surface oddity and a vaguely threatening atmosphere that I don't think earns its darkness the way something genuinely unsettling should.

Maybe I'm being too hard on it. Maybe it's one of those films you have to meet at the right age, and I came to it too late, or my kids came to it in an era where they've got sharper, more confident family films to compare it against. But I can only tell you what I experienced, and what I experienced was two hours of mild discomfort and a living room full of anxious children.

Iconic? Sure. I'll give it that. There's a cultural footprint here that's impossible to ignore, and Wilder is clearly doing something, even if I'm not sure I want to be in the same room as it. But enjoyable? No, not really. It's aged like curdled milk, and I think if you showed it to most children today without the weight of nostalgia behind it, they'd either burst into tears or start quietly working out the nearest fire exit.

Two stars.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 1971  | Watched: 2025-04-15

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More family: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Wonder (2017) · Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anastasia (1997)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)