Simplistic but powerful

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2009)

Guillermo del Toro's film, 'Pan's Labyrinth', is a magic realist movie, in which a young girl, living amid bloody and persistent rebellion following the official end of the Spanish Civil War, takes refuge in a fantasy world. The film has a moral viewpoint that plainly divides the world into good and evil, and as with most stories based on fantasy, there's a certain arbitrariness to some of the plot. But it also has an epic feel, and a certain poetic grandeur, and manages to pull off its mixture of realism and make-believe without descending into silliness. There are other films that better capture the ambiguity of internal conflict; but this is still a movie of originality and power.