Entertaining, but didn't quite live up to the hype

Rating: 7/10 (8 April 2019)

Entertaining and has lots of visual pop, but didn't quite live up to everything I had heard about it (this was my first time watching it, and I had always been interested). It's kind of a strange intersection, with the fairytale elements put alongside brutal violence and torture, but I think that was part of the point, the innocence lost in war and for Spain under the Franco regime. In the blend of fantasy and reality, I thought the fantasy elements worked better, and I wish there had been more of them. I loved the dreamy feeling of the child from the 'other world' and my favorite part was the Pale Man; the visuals are fantastic in that scene and I loved the Goya reference. The other half of the movie with the resistance fighters is decent, but not as strong as it could have been. It needed more nuance; the captain is cartoonishly evil and the plot is suspect at key points (e.g. a moment when it defies logic for someone not to kill him). I think the weak link here is unfortunately in the writing, as the story and characters are pretty simple.