Emotionally powerful and melancholic adult fairytale

Rating: 8/10 (14 October 2017)

This film has a bit of everything : fantastical creatures, horror and tension, historical slice- of-life (dealing with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil war in 1944), a fairy-tale like story competing for screen time with a grim military attack against rebellious guerillas, loathsome and sadistic characters, but also cute and inherently good characters, warm and fuzzy sequences full of love and emotion, but also extremely brutal and disturbing violence. But most importantly, this film has a lot of heart, and by the end you will feel intimately connected with its principal characters, and it will make you cry with its stirring and somewhat ambiguous climax.
This has been called an adult fairytale and there is a lot of ambiguity as to whether the magical and fantastical sequences are real or the imaginations of a scared and lonely child. There are clues towards both these possibilities, but I personally believe that thematically, it makes more sense that the fantasy sequences are just created by the mind of our child protagonist to cope with all the strangeness and brutality around her, and the ending really hits you even more powerfully with this assumption, as we grasp the true purpose of these imaginings and see how it helps her to achieve peace and happiness in a really grim situation.