Truly, A "Fairy Tale For Adults..."

Rating: 10/10 (4 December 2008)

Anyone looking at the poster art, reading the subject line of this review and not taking it seriously, needs to have their head examined. Although it is basically the story of a little girl, THIS IS NOT A CHILDREN'S TALE. Go rent THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA and let them watch that for the billionth time. At least that won't leave any permanent psychological damage.
Now, having said that, PAN'S LABYRINTH is not a film that the grown-up set should miss. We all remember as children, how the true world of fairy tales was a place that could be filled with as much menace, danger and even certain death as it was magic, wonder and all the fantasy your imagination could hold. HELLBOY and THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE director Guillermo del Toro takes you back into this world, and reawakens your inner child in ways you never dreamed of.
It is the post-Civil War Spain of 1944, where the uncompromising armies of Franco have claimed victory, and are mercilessly bent on eliminating any forces of resistance. In such a dark time, children are especially helpless subjects to the whims of their adult benefactors, who are capable of dispensing either the most boundless love or the deepest cruelty at will. Caught somewhere in between the two is eleven-year-old Ofelia, (a flawless performance by young Ivana Baquero). With her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), who is ill and with child, she travels to the home of her stepfather, the heartless Captain Vidal (a blood-freezing turn by Sergi Lopez, who is so frighteningly good, he almost makes you forget Ralph Fiennes in SCHINDLER'S LIST).
Ofelia and Carmen are only under the Captain's protection because Carmen is allegedly carrying the Fascist leader's heir. With her mother mostly too ill to care for her and her stepfather alternating between cruelty and dismissiveness, Ofelia finds comfort only in the attentions of Vidal's brow-beaten housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), and in the world of magic and fairy tales she escapes into from the evils of the real adult world.
Sitting behind the Captain's mountain home, Ofelia discovers an beautiful old labyrinth, and soon makes her acquaintance with its sole inhabitant, a Faun (Doug Jones, who played Abe Sapien in HELLBOY). Convinced that she is the descendant of the Princess who fled his magical world ages ago, the Faun sets Ofelia to perform three dangerous tasks, that will prove she is truly the Princess and deserves to return to her place in the kingdom of Fauns and Faeries.
But the intrusion of the bloody savagery of war cannot be evaded for very long, and soon the dangerous, magical fantasy in which Ofelia is enraptured begins to intertwine with the dramatic and profound events taking place in "the real world", involving real danger and the deadliest of consequences, until both tales simultaneously reach noble, if tragic conclusions.
I want to rant and rave and rant some more for pages on end about this film, but that wouldn't work here. If you are a lover of all kinds of movies, you owe it to yourself not to miss this one.
With all the remarkable work that del Toro has already done in the genre world, it's pretty safe to say that PAN'S LABYRINTH is not only his greatest achievement, but that he may never do anything that surpasses it. Yes, THAT'S how good this movie is. Go rent it and see it NOW.