Brilliant movie

Rating: 9/10 (2 November 2007)

What I really appreciate about this movie is the mixing between the "real" story and the "fantastic" story.. I used the "" since the director really surprises us all in the end, and apparently the "real" story in the sense that it is not an illusion in the movie can be viewed as the one that we at the first instance would considered as the fictional. The fantastic underworld of Ophelia is quite real in the movie, and she is being tested in our "real" world so that she can prove that she deserves to come back to the place from where she had escaped. I believe this could be the perfect allegory for a scenario of war, irrespective of the location and the time. The director has chosen the Spanish war but any war scenario would work for this movie. Although my opinion is quite subjective, I would say that the point of this movie is that any war can be so horrible and inhuman that even a perfect fairy tale should be seen as anything more real than it for us. This is why the characters are so stereotypical in the movie, except for the ones that are more closely related to the "fairy tale": Ophelia and Mercedes. This inversion is really original and this is why it works so well in the end.