Not a masterpiece, but a master of pieces

Rating: 6/10 (24 January 2007)

An intriguing mixture of fantasy and period drama, this curious hybrid moves along wonderfully but seems a tad overrated in my book, perhaps due to a lavish praise being heaped upon the very concept itself, which may ignore some of the smaller lulls that weigh down the film a bit. By no means slow-paced or uninspired, Pan's Labyrinth still flounders slightly with it's somewhat forced contrasts in brutality and magic.
Everyone has been praising writer/director Guillermo del Toro's visionary tactics enabling the film to walk a fine line between the stark, fascist violence that exists in the 1944 Spanish villa owned by a tyrannical general, and the surreal, escapist world the general's soon to be daughter wields as her defensive mechanism in coping with her depressed reality. Slipping further and further into the backyard woods that eventually becomes the visually intensive labyrinth of discussion, del Toro does create a fascinating parallel world, but in contrasting the two, becomes a little more tedious then I was led to believe.
Young Ofelia's various "quests", through which the fantasy arc takes root, are visually inventive but do not make for much of a convincing narrative, mostly feeling pieced together instead of a cohesive adventure. Despite the rigorous attention to set design which complement the original creatures, the contrasting world of reality appears littered with stereotypes and a stifled predictability.
While I would not call this all important contrasting of realities underutilized, I also would certainly not call it completely adept; Del Toro has moved away from the adolescent joys of previous work, but still has a little to go before making a certifiable masterwork. Still, the overwhelming technical proficiency demonstrated mostly in the engrossing fantasy sequences prove to flesh out a further emotional and mental statement that help make Pan's Labyrinth one of the more mature and critically acclaimed fantasy films to come along in years.