Pan's Labyrinth: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

Guillermo del Toro’s excellent new film, "Pan’s Labyrinth," is a violent, enthralling children’s movie made for adults.

Let’s underscore that. As much as the movie appears to be for children — and as much as it has to say about childhood — it is not for children. Its backdrop is a fascist nightmare that bleeds horror with an ease that’s unsettling.

On one level, the film is about the wonders of childhood, but on a deeper, more profound level, it’s about the risks inherent in childhood, which can be dire, particularly where fantasy is involved.

From del Toro’s own script, the film understands that for a child thrown into emotional turmoil, fantasy often is the only reasonable, accessible escape. The trouble is that for those who do give themselves over to it, unwittingly or not, the borders between what’s real and what isn’t can become dangerously blurred.

Such is the case for the film’s 10-year-old lead character Ofelia (the marvelous Ivana Baquero), who in 1944 Spain finds herself fatherless in the wake of that country’s civil war, uprooted from her home and now on a journey to Northern Spain with her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil).

Carmen is the recent wife of fascist leader Capt. Vidal (Sergi Lopez), a vicious man who instills in Ofelia such fear, she retreats into what at first appears to be the comparative safety of a fairy-tale world. But when it becomes clear to her that her mother is so ill, she might not live through the pregnancy, and when Ofelia realizes that Vidal routinely is murdering those rising up against him and his political beliefs, her fairy-tale world takes a turn into darkness, with the faun Pan (Doug Jones) repeatedly offering her choices that threaten her life.

With its broad echoes of "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," not to mention the bleakest works by The Brothers Grimm, the movie also scores in a subplot involving Vidal’s doctor (Alex Angulo) and housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdu). Each are anti-fascist insiders working against Vidal’s regime, which heightens the suspense as their game of chess is played out.

In the end, "Pan’s Labyrinth" is one of last year’s best films, a movie that’s so good — so richly imagined, satisfying and real in spite of Eugenio Caballero’s beautifully surreal production design — that it will be nominated for the Academy Award it might just win: Best Foreign Language Film.

Grade: A