The stuff of beautiful nightmares

Rating: 9/10 (6 March 2007)

Having received a twenty minute standing ovation when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, Pan's Labyrinth was always going to be one of two things - a masterpiece, or a film that thinks it is a masterpiece and unsurprisingly, message boards up and down the net are already afire with discussions as to whether it deserves all the praise. Which camp you fall in to is all down to personal opinion of course, but nevertheless Guillermo Del Toro should be applauded for bringing an uncompromising personal vision into such a wide public sphere. Pan's Labyrinth you see, is not an easy film to watch. Describing it as a fairy tale may have convinced some people that it will be an adult spin on a children's medium, something the entire family can sit down and enjoy, but this couldn't be further from the truth.
Set in rural Spain in the aftermath of the civil war, it shows fascism at its most oppressive. The credits have barely finished rolling before a captured peasant is bludgeoned to near death with a glass bottle, his father screaming in anguish beside him and then both being remorselessly shot. Later, a torture victim is shown dripping in blood, covered in bruises and with his hand slashed right down the middle, begging a sympathetic doctor to kill him. Elsewhere, fascist police officers stroll through the corpses of gun battle victims placing a bullet in the head of each one to ensure that they are dead. And this is without even considering the nightmarish fantasy elements of the plot either. One thing Pan's Labyrinth most definitely isn't, is a children's movie. This is the stuff of adult nightmares.
However, there is a certain beauty about it. As the tag-line reads, "innocence has a power evil cannot imagine" and in-between all the civil strife, beatings and lip slashing wanders Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), the pre-pubescent step daughter of the tyrannical Captain Vidal. With her heavily pregnant mother sick and her step father dismissive of her, the girl finds herself alone in an unfamiliar place. Surrounded by darkness and fear, she stumbles wide eyed into a hidden world, where a faun (the make up clad Doug Jones) informs her she is in fact a princess and the time has to come to return to her true father's side...
The result, is a head on collision between Ofelia's childlike wonder and the stark reality of Franco-era Spain. It is never fully stated whether Pan's secret realm genuinely exists, or simply the creation of the girl's overactive imagination (she is obsessed with fairy tales after all), but the fantasy element lends a serene beauty to the proceedings, despite being as vicious in places as the countryside she longs to escape. The faun himself is equally friendly as he is haunting for instance, but this is nothing compared to the nightmarish Pale Man (Doug Jones again). In the creation of the child-eating albino monster whose eyes fit in the palm of his hands, Del Toro has more or less completely debunked the myth of the fantasy genre as harmless entertainment for the kids and fashioned a beast that will cause sleepless nights all round.
Regardless of this though, the critics of Pan's Labyrinth still have much to chew on. Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) for instance is sometimes so evil that he gets dangerously close to being a jack booted parody and there is little of the fantasy here that isn't in debt to Grimm's Fairy Tales or Lewis Carroll, but to focus on these things would be to overlook just how perfectly executed the entire movie is. You may be horrified by the Labyrinth, but at the same time you won't be able to look away. True, it is slightly disappointing that the fantasy world does not take up as much of the running time as you might hope, but this is a minor complaint when the film is this impressive. It is both beautiful and dangerous, violent and tender, uplifting and sad and a highly accomplished project for a director who could easily have sat back and made millions with another Blade movie. Just be prepared to be sleeping with the lights on for a while.