Dorothy on a Drastic Bummer.

Rating: 7/10 (20 August 2007)

The film had enough hype behind it that I settled in to watch it. In the first ten minutes I was considering watching an Agatha Christie mystery instead. At the end of fifteen minutes it had me and I couldn't get away.
Ofelia, who should know better at fourteen, has childhood fantasies about fairies and fauns and monsters and magic cures. She lives in Spain in 1944. Her mother is having a troubled pregnancy and her stepfather is a sadistic murdering brute who represents General Franco. There a lot of special effects in the first ten minutes or so. A fairy visits her and beckons her into a labyrinth, at the bottom of which is a faun who gives her three scary tasks. She completes the first one okay -- feeding stones to a giant toad. She flunks the second, but, given a last chance, she succeeds at the third, which means giving her life for the life of her infant brother. She ascends into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of her long-gone real father, and the left hand of her newly deceased mother.
What turned me off were those special effects. First of all, the fairy that visits her in her bedroom, the first time, is not my idea of a fairy. The fairy starts of fluttering around the room and making an ominous crackling sound. The first time Ofelia sees it, it looks like a cross between a stick insect and a praying mantis. I don't know if the producers intended it that way but the thing made my skin crawl. Ditto for the "faun." This is the least pettable faun in your collective unconscious. A stone statue creaks into life and turns into this hideous, demonic creature with monster ram horns, a thoroughly screwed up face, long pointy fingernails, hooves and whatnot. It speaks in a slow raspy voice that sounds as if it's lying with every phoneme. If that's the best fantasy she can come up with, she needs to get into Deepak Chopra or something. Gave me the willies.
At that, it may be an improvement over the real world she lives in, a story that saves the film in my estimation. All these Spanish folks are just trying to get along, see, except for Franco's soldiers, of which Ofelia's stepfather is one. He has a nasty habit of going around shooting people, including, in the end, the young girl. He does it without passion, without remorse, even when the victims turn out to be innocent. Sometimes, I guess out of boredom, he allows a doomed prisoner to try brushing away the muzzle a few times before he finally pulls the trigger. On the other side are the communist peasants who live in the hills. They're the good guys and see to it that the stepfather pays for his sins.
The special effects were overdone. It's as if they'd been designed by somebody on shrooms. Many of the fantasy creatures are covered with the glutinous substance that sticks to everything, and the sound people have made it sound as if someone is stirring a pot of molasses with a wooden spoon. It would have been a better film if the effects had been turned down a little bit. They seem intended to dazzle rather than convince, but the only people who will be dazzled would be children who haven't played video games or watched crummy monster movies. The effects are even overdone during the real-life story, as when the stepfather sews up his own slashed cheek. He didn't need to do that. First, he could have called the company medic who would have done a better job. Second, we've already witnessed this scene when Arnold Schwarzenegger plucks out his own eyeball in "The Terminator." It's not shocking. It's self indulgent.
But, the CGI aside, it's an innovative movie. There have been other Spanish films about kids' fantasies ("The Spirit of the Hive") but this one is livelier and truly gripping. A person who has just been shot isn't yanked backwards like a marionette, the cliché treatment. He may hardly notice it at first, pause to remove his glasses, before slumping. The director will sometimes cut while a foreground object, such as a tree trunk, interrupts the flow of the images. And more than once there are other people witnessing a scene but they are hidden from us until someone waves aside the obscuring object, which may be an open umbrella. The shocks are effective and more subtle than anything in the fantasies. The movie really does resemble "The Wizard of Oz" played as tragedy. We even get a pair of Ofelia's red shoes. The ending, of course, is a cop out unless you can believe, as some do, that fantasy life continues after we expire. And the good peasants didn't win, as they seem to in the movie. Instead, Franco lived on to a ripe old age and the baton was passed to his son. The film will break your heart, but it's a nice fantasy.