Written and Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Starring Adriana Gil, Ivana Baquero, and Sergi Lopez
Pan’s Labyrinth is a compelling and disturbing film that mixes realistic historical drama with dark fantasy. The story opens with a fairytale-like story about a princess who escapes from her life in a magical underground kingdom, but who becomes confused in the light, losing her memory. It then shifts to the ‘real world’ of Spain in 1944. During the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War a fascist captain commands an outpost which is under attack by guerrillas.
He has summoned his pregnant wife and step-daughter to live with him. On the way, the wife, Carmen, feels ill; she and her daughter, Ofelia, get out of the car. This allows Ofelia to explore the woods alone for a moment, where she catches a glimpse of a strange insect that she believes to be a fairy.
As the film progresses, two stories unfold. The first is that of Ofelia, who discovers that she may be the lost fairy princess when she encounters a Faun that sets her several challenges to prove herself worthy of re-entering the underworld. The second tells the more realistic and gruesome tale of the guerrilla’s struggle against the Captain and his fascist outpost.
There are moments of horror in both stories. Ofelia’s encounter with a monster with eyes in its hands is straight out of nightmare, while still offering the viewer a ghoulish treat. The Captain’s brutal torture of his prisoners outstrips the famous scene in Reservoir Dogs for visceral cruelty without stepping over the line into voyeurism or violence as pornography.
The film makes a cogent argument for the value of freewill using both stories to illustrate the point. The fascist Captain seeks to impose his will on others with mixed results as the military types obey even when they are clearly disturbed by his orders whereas a civilian doctor refuses. This conflict is mirrored in Ofelia’s story as the trials that the faun sets for her require her to follow his orders to succeed. In one trial Ofelia disobeys with frightening and near disastrous consequences before the final trial which demands unswerving obedience but at a price that Ofelia may not be willing to pay.
Director Guillermo Del Toro seems effortless at writing and directing what can only be called dark fantasy. Whether at the commercial end in Blade 2 and Hellboy or in his Spanish language films, Chronos and the Devil’s Backbone, Del Toro creates a wonderful blend of real and unreal that heightens the viewers perception of both element. The use of fantasy allows him to explore themes of right and wrong in fairly simple terms, but then, perversely these will twist back on the viewer in an old fashioned fairy-tale way so that the seemingly simple morality tale becomes a mirror for the horrors of the real world.
Pan’s Labyrinth is a Spanish language move shown with English subtitles, but don’t let that put you off. The visuals are stunning, the fantasy is spectacularly dark and the real world is drawn with such love and cruelty that it is sometimes overwhelming.
This is not a happy film, not a Narnia for grown-ups or a Middle Earth for 2006, this is a Grimm’s Fairy Tale for the 21st Century. Bad things happened to people regardless of the purity of their character, and the movie ends on a note that will have you thinking about what it meant for days or weeks to come. Is Ofelia really a fairytale princess or is she just a girl who has fantasies to escape the grim reality of war and sadness? Watch for yourself and decide or discover, perhaps, that it doesn’t matter either way.
John Davidson Despite working in IT for the last 20 years and collecting comics for even longer, he is married, has two young daughters and lives in Scotland. Ideally he spends his spare time reading and watching movies, but this is curtailed by the calls of child-rearing and part-time study, not to mention the 'call of the internet'.