Pan's excrement

Rating: 1/10 (9 August 2015)

Location is king. Not only in real-estate business but in film industry as well, at least when it comes to earning respect of posh film- goers, i.e. film critics and IMDb-ers.
If this film was done in Hollywood, just the way it is, everybody and their dog would hate it. If it was an "indie", it would've been "okay" and "interesting". But it was a non-English speaking film, with subtitles, directed by a Mexican, produced in Spain. And there you have it - it's a "foreign masterpiece" earning universal acclaim. Everybody seems to have lost their minds and I'll take as a consolation that at least general public didn't buy this crap. Not in droves anyway. Unfortunately the film was successful enough to assure the screenwriter/director behind it, Guillermo del Toro, further Hollywood gigs so we can be treated to more puerile fantasies he created living in his mother's basement. I mean, just take a look at his face, that's what mothers' basements residents look like.
It's not the first time that a pretentious and vile turd is held in a high regard. It's just that it was nowhere else as obvious as it is here, right from the start. A fantasy story of an underworld is gratuitously intertwined with a story from the Spanish Civil War. Gratuitously, because Spanish Civil War is not really topical these days (perhaps not even in Spain anymore), but what's worse and more important, the two stories almost never interact with each other throughout the film. The only connection seems to be the character of a little girl, who lives during the War, and the fantasy underworld, hiding beneath the Pan's labyrinth, may or may not be a figment of her imagination. Depending of what's the case, she uses it to either physically or mentally escape the brutalities of everyday life. She switches locations back and forth but appears to fall victim to circumstances in both the real and the imaginary realms, until the very end where she is bestowed with some bureaucratic powers in the underworld. By that time, nobody cares anymore, firstly because it's hard to relate to a constant victim, and secondly because the underworld was never given any meaningful purpose, not even as an allegory.
Another gratuitous thing is violence. The other character the film concentrates on is the girl's stepfather, a Spanish officer. Atrocities we see him commit throughout are so needlessly graphically gruesome to the point one can't believe what's on screen. Maybe the point was to show brutality of war, I'd go with that, but the sheer intensity and the grotesqueness of it throw the concept of parallel stories way off-balance. There is no way the Underworld story can parry. The difference is too jarring to be called "juxtaposition". It's more like changing the channels between two different films. Furthermore, some key scenes with the officer are shot from his point of view, thus inviting us to relate to a sadistic psychopath, who is, on top of all, poorly underwritten. He is just hundred percent mean to the core, without room for anything else whatsoever. Claustrophobic, really. To coerce the audience to relate to that reveals Guillermo del Toro as a sick, deranged psychopath himself. Kind of like Quentin Tarantino, but lacking any sort of wit that would redeem the experience.
What del Toro doesn't lack is the pretentiousness. He throws in the Civil War, as if that alone was supposed to *mean* something, but never bothers to provide us with the "why". He builds up the story as if there will be some great payoff for the viewers after all they've been put through. But it never comes. There is a closure, but it's such a one-note write-off, one wonders what the hell was the whole film for. Interestingly enough, it wasn't boring to watch. But, then again, getting your fingernails pulled out with a pair of pliers isn't boring either.
Set designs and effects are good. Too bad they were there merely to dress up del Toro's macabre onanism.