Often hard to watch but ultimately very rewarding and powerful

Rating: 10/10 (18 February 2007)

This movie is pretty brilliant, I would say that it is a great movie, including a quite excellent performance by the male lead (villain) who the producers cautioned the director would not be able to deliver the role. Boy were they wrong. He deserves an award for his performance. Much of it was pretty brutal and rather hard to sit there and watch but I was very glad to have seen this. I was really glad that the filmmakers had the good taste to cut away at some points and didn't show on screen some things that happened in the story.
It concerns a gruesome battle going on between fascist forces in Spain and resistance forces circa 1940's I think, and in the midst of this is a little girl who gets involved in a rich fantasy world of magic and monsters. It is a rather intense, emotionally powerful, enchanting and violent movie. A dark fantasy.
Pan's Labyrinth is about many things and works on many different levels, but for me it seemed to be showing that in brutal, desperate times as in the story, some people will follow orders without question so that they can sort of save their own hides for a time, while others will do the compassionate, right things for others around them, even if it means giving up their own life and die with their moral boots on. And it suggest that maybe there is a higher system of things that is testing us to see what side of that line we will fall on and who we really are under such circumstances. A brilliant movie.