Pan's Labyrinth
Directed and written by Guillermo Del Toro
Starring Ivana Baquero, Ariadna Gil and Sergi Lopez
Classification: 14A
Rating: ****
Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro is best-known to English-speaking audiences for his ghoulish, comic-book adaptations such as Hellboy or Blade II, but he also makes more personal Spanish-language films such as Chronos and The Devil's Backbone. Like that latter film, Pan's Labyrinth is a child's story set against the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, and it may well be his masterpiece. This is like no movie you've seen before, a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.
In the 1940s, while Franco is victorious in Spain and war still rages across Europe, young Ofelia (13-year-old Ivana Baquero) is relocated to a military outpost with her sickly, pregnant mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil). Ofelia's real father has been killed and her pretty mother has married the fascist Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) to ensure the survival of herself and her daughter. The captain is a handsome, brutal sadist who can barely tolerate Ofelia and whose main interest in her mother is to bear him a son.
He spends his days with a handful of soldiers, working to exterminate the remnants of the Republican guerrilla stragglers in the woods. His enemies have allies in the military camp, including a humanitarian doctor (Alex Angulo) and the housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdu from Y tu mama tambien), who is also Ofelia's only friend.
The girl retreats into her books of fairytales and, on walks in the woods, into a fantasy world. After entering a maze in the woods, she encounters a mythical faun who introduces her to an alternative reality. Fans of C.S. Lewis's book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (or the recent movie) may feel they've been on this path before. From the outset though, the details are more insidious and foreboding.
The faun is neither cute nor uncertain. The gnarly old satyr (Doug Jones) seems to be made of tree roots. He is ancient and quick to snarl in anger, and while he's less frightening than her stepfather, he may be just as sinister. He insists she must realize her rightful identity as an underground princess by undergoing a series of terrifying tests.
The fantasy allows Del Toro to give full sway to his use of digital creations - straight from the land of nightmares - on the screen. There's a monstrous toad with a key in its mouth, which lives under an ancient tree, sucking out its life. There's also a faceless, pale, naked humanoid creature, looking both fetal and aged, with eyes in the palms of its hands, which sets out a tempting feast to entrap anyone who dares eat.
Meanwhile, in the outside world, Ofelia's mother is suffering from the difficult last stages of her labour. The captain is busy torturing and killing his captive prisoners and, for Ofelia, events are coming to a crisis.
Pan's Labryinth is no fairy tale, and not a point-by-point allegory, though the voracious monsters Del Toro has created are instinctively understood as manifestations of fascism's romance with cruelty and death. The movie's most impressive accomplishment is the way it moves between the two worlds, without suggesting the deeper reality of one or the other.
This year has been an exceptional one for Mexican filmmakers: Alfonso Cuaron, who served as an executive producer on Pan's Labyrinth, directed Children of Men; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu directed the globe-trotting story of miscommunication, Babel. All three men were born in the early sixties and work both in Spanish and English and they've brought a freshly grown-up imagination to mainstream movies. Even at their most fantastic, as with Pan's Labyrinth, these films aren't really escapist; they're about those things we're trying to escape from.
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