A Kafka of the Silver Screen

Rating: 9/10 (18 February 2007)

Guided by his unmatched imagination, and masterfully using the German language as his tool, the thirty-two year old Franz Kafka has written "Metamorphosis", one of the deepest and most absorbing tales of world literature, devoted to a description of the artist's position in bourgeois society. Guided by a seemingly no less spectacular imagination, and a thorough mastery of modern cinematographic techniques, the forty-two year old Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has given us a magnificent, rich and multi-layered movie about the horrors of the Spanish Civil war.
Exposed to these horrors without any protection, a young girl tries to cope, by creating a parallel fiction-world of her own, in which she has a degree of control over the magical happenings. Like in all fairy tales, she is subjected to difficult "tests", while during the civil war the Spanish nation as a whole endures difficult "trials". The director cuts back and forth seamlessly between these two worlds, and while the spectator is under the impression of watching two stories unfold, one "real", the other fictional, they are more or less the same story, and in this very original manner, Mr. del Toro, with supreme artistry, paints a picture that, more fully than one would have thought possible, captures the finest nuances of human suffering.
In spite of the horrors they depict, the special effects during the fantasy sequences are of a rare artistry and conjure up images of Francisco de Goya's masterpiece "Saturn Devouring One of His Children", and somewhat surprisingly of the great American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin's "Feast of Fools."
At a deeper level, this movie manages to add a new insight into the fundamental and by now well-explored topic of the relationship between reality and fiction. In "El Laberinto del Fauno" reality and fiction are not each other's reflections, or extensions, but rather together they give an understanding that neither history nor art by itself could come close to conveying.