Hype's Labyrinth

Rating: 7/10 (18 April 2007)

Encouraged to watch this by the intriguing storyline and awards it won I finally got round to it wanting it to be as mesmerising as it was claimed. Well no, but it is a well crafted, fabulously photographed and darkly violent imaginative fantasy film. A previous post criticised it for not being fantasy enough - I got news for him: all films are fantasy because they depict worlds no-one knows and condense and order stories into contrived chunks for mass digestion. Why make fantasy realistic?
Girl wants to and is given the opportunity to become a Princess in Fairyland partly out of childishness but also to escape the horrors of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. She has to complete three tasks successfully - something not quite achieved but! Like A Matter Of Life And Death and others, you are shown that this other world could be just an hallucination, even at the very end and even though you need it to be really true by then after all the brutality you've sat through. A brutal opinion of the audience indeed. There are three things shown to good advantage by this film: one is the sadism of the Captain and therefore the sadism of the movie makers in rubbing our noses in such fantasy bestiality, two is the eye-cutting digital cartoonery especially essential for the fantasy sections, and three with the present day message that Franco represented a dark time it actually succeeds into making you believe that the Republicans won the War instead of losing and instilling a "positive" note into the proceedings: another fantasy. If you need to see a truly wondrous fantasy film with subtitles watch Jean Cocteau's Belle Et La Bete instead.
I enjoyed it to a point but hated the glorification of routine violence as a worthy artform even though I know that pandering to todays progressive and enlightened audiences could have made it much worse. Does it make us all better people to see a cheek being digitally knifed open or does it take us all down yet another notch? Because of all that not on my welcome back list, but it's interesting and thought-provoking stuff unless you're pretty sure that you can do without it.