A successful fairy tale film, finally.

Rating: 8/10 (30 October 2006)

Truly this is a fairy tale masterpiece. There is such strength here, such control, such artistic vision all topped off with a knack for story-telling that is so uncommon in this genre of film-making. This is the film we all wanted to see when we saw Burton's Big Fish or Chronicles of Narnia or Columbus's Harry Potter movies. Yes, this was a paint by numbers set like all those others, but no it didn't suffocate itself with the imagery. Anthony Lane once wrote in describing Star Wars -- also a failed fairy tale in a lot of respects -- that in Lucas's movies "style was strangled at birth by design". This is one of the first movies that doesn't fall prey to that. Pan's Labyrinth in the same league as Cuarón's Azkaban, though the world in Del Toro's movie is more ambitious.
Pan's Labyrinth is the story of Ofelia, a young girl whose widowed mother marries an officer in Spanish dictator Franco's service. The officer is a sociopath and the skirmishes with the resistance are practically at her door when she discovers a world of magic nearby. She gets involved with extremely well-designed characters, and the plot splits into two related and complimentary stories. As each plot moves together the film comes to a fable-like conclusion. You are enraptured through.