116 minutes of thought-provoking film. Ultimately frustrating for those who can swallow a less-than-happy-ending.

Rating: 6/10 (3 June 2007)

Ofelia goes to a Mill in Spain to live with her pregnant mother and captain stepfather to find that she is in the middle of the end of the Spanish Civil war where her captain stepfather is an evil minion of Franco who attempts to carry out the Spanish wish to eradicate a rebel faction . Her imagination and sense of adventure leads her to a labyrinth where she meets a faun who leads her through two tasks which (with the addition of a third) should result in her becoming a princess reunited with her father in the seven gardens of the underworld (never stated in the film:hell).
Ultimately, we see brutality in the human existence that would lead anyone into a quandary about which to choose. Ultimately, she chooses not to sacrifice her newborn brother to hell in favor of surviving to be killed by the brutal captain. Once she dies, she is reunited with her father and mother in a wonderful place that it seems she ultimately was meant to be a part of (the last 3 minutes).
Until the last 3 minutes, this film is ultimately about the choice between hell and human existence, and which is a better path. Why the filmmakers decided to answer a question about what happens to the child after she dies, I don't know. I LOVED the film through 113 minutes. The final three absolutely ruin it (tie it up in a bow so that those who don't get the literary references can be happy about the fact that the girl gets a happy ending, while horrendously disappointing those that understand the parallel themes between the Franco- Spanish reality and hell-based mythology).