Not for the faint of heart (or anyone that hasn't hit puberty).

Rating: 10/10 (25 January 2011)

**SPOILER ALERT**
While not a new movie, I think Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" is still worth reviewing five years after it's 2006 release. First and foremost, this film reminds us that fairy tales were never meant for children. Mostly born from local legends and superstitions passed down through oral tradition, "faerie tales" were made popular a century later in Paris' belle epoch, and even later through the German romantic period of literature. In American popular culture, it's easy to remember that Ariel doesn't get her prince at the end of The Little Mermaid, she gives her own life rather than bring harm to her prince, who sleeps with his head on his true lover's breast. Again through Disney's prudish filter, Sleeping Beauty doesn't conclude neatly with a wedding; in the original story, her prince knocks up her unconscious body (hello, near necrophilia) and she eventually wakes giving birth to twins, cold and alone in the castle. My point is this-- director Guillermo de Toro doesn't shy away from the earliest components of true faerie tales: brutality, sensuality, terror and horror, moral ambiguity, sacrifice. In fact, he wallows in them, and invites the viewer to revel in a visual orgy of color, dark symbolism, the fantastic and terrible.
If there was any doubt that this movie is not for children, some of the opening sequences will quickly settle the matter. It seems to take place in northern Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War, in the camp of the fascist regime, whose goal is to route out and exterminate the last of the rebels hiding in the mountains. The Captain of this camp is a sadistic thug who could teach Hannibal Lechter a few things about inspiring terror. He brings his pregnant wife and her precocious daughter from a prior marriage into the camp, as he is rabidly anxious for the arrival of his sun. In one of the first scene, he brutally beats a man to death, and the upclose camera never flinches away. The story centers around the young daughter, Ofelia. Obsessed with fantasy and the idea of happily ever after, but really is it any wonder, as she is growing up in war-torn Spain, her biological father presumably dead, her step-father a monster, and an absent minded mother growing increasingly ill and distracted by the baby she carries in her womb.
It is curious to note that the worse things become in reality, the more fantastic the creatures and tasks presented in Ofelia's other world become. Following the theme of traditional folklore faerie tales, like Persephone she is warned against eating whilst in the under world. Ofelia is not wholly unlike Alice down the rabbit hole; they are both curious, precocious girls thrust into a fantastical world. But there the similarity ends for me. Ofelia is gritty in a way Alice could never be. In one quest Ofelia tries to provide esoteric help for her mother, who writhes sick in childbed with her unborn brother, and in another she enlists the help of faeries to retrieve a stolen token by a great fat toad killing the roots what may be viewed as a world tree (Cabbala). Alice must decide between a potion that makes her small and a cookie that makes her large, Ofelia is offered the entirety of her fantasy world, if like Abraham, she delivers her newborn brother for sacrifice.
I can't recommend this movie strongly enough, but likely it will not be received well by the masses, for the simple reason that it is in Spanish, and subtitled rather than dubbed. So put the kids to bed, turn off the Disney channel, and give this movie a try. If you are anything like me you'll get so swept up in the story you'll forget you're even having to read subtitles. You'll be too busy being horrified, in wonder, heart-sore from the tragedy and hopeful that even in this gritty, uncompromising faerie tale, there might still be some sort of happily ever after.