The Welcome Nightmare

Rating: 10/10 (7 March 2007)

Never, before I saw 'Pan's Labyrinth', have I walked out of a theater feeling quite this beaten up. Sure, 'Hostel' should be the exception, but that's another story and another genre.
I did, like I had been told, enter the cinema with both an open heart and an open mind, and that would appear to be the key to really - I will not say enjoy, 'cause this is not a very enjoyable movie, it's something else - get something (or everything) out of it. The story is quite simple, it's a fable, so of coarse, but yet so complex.
The poor book worm Ofelia finds herself, some time after the end of the Spanish civil war, in a remote mountain village with her mother and her new daddy: the cruel fascist Captain Vidal. There are still anti-Franco rebels hiding in the hills, and they are to be drawn out and terminated under Vidals command - and like any child of harsh times, Ofelia starts living inside her head.
Outside the house, there is a maze that's been standing for much longer than any of the village's houses. And it is there, that Ofelia finds her way into another world - a fairy-tale world, where she is the lost princess of a magical kingdom, bound to return to the underground to reign. But to get there she has to complete a number of tasks for the odd Faun that she meets in the maze.
Unlike many who has not seen 'Pan's Labyrinth' likes to think, the scariest parts of the movie are in fact not the ones that take place in the bizarre fable-world (we have all seen the pale man with eyes in his palms), but the ones that take place in the real world (but then again, what is really real in the eyes of a child?). It is those moments of pure terror, not much unlike movies such as 'Schindlers List' and 'The Pianist' that leaves you so empty, and full of questions, whilst the side-story of the underground kingdom leaves you warm and hopeful. It sounds so cheesy, I know, but it's true. The innocence of a child's mind, versus the true evil of the real world.
But ultimately, it really is not a happy story.
But I have to see it again. I don't care about the nightmares, I'll welcome them this time.