Del Toro's masterpiece

Rating: 8/10 (22 August 2014)

Many reviewers complain about this movie being too dark, about it being too cruel by exposing a child lead character to a painful reality she can only escape through fantasy. Actually, the cruelty portrayed is absolutely faithful to the historical context the story takes place in and the fantasy side of Ofelia's adventure is both visually and emotionally breathtaking.
The characters are meant to be one dimensional, black and white as some have described it, because this is a fairy tale at heart. Heroes and innocent characters struggling against perverse villains under the most bleak circumstances. Vidal is both a realistic fascist and true fairy tale villain, Ofelia is both a lost princess in distress and a poor kid suffering for her mother's decisions. The duality of the story between fantasy and reality is greatly projected through it's main characters, successfully conveying the horrors of a civil war that tore a country apart and the need for the fantastic quest that Ofelia undergoes to be true so that she's spared from a miserable life.
Certainly this is not a tale meant for little children, though we should know by now that nothing coming from Guillermo Del Toro's imagination will ever be fit for little kids or impressionable minds in general. Is a dark tale, both in it's real and it's fantastic aspect, a darkness that accomplishes it's goal of showing a grim real world and discovering an astonishingly beautiful yet scary fantasy realm.