Never before have disturbing, dark and tragic fairy tales been so completely wonderful. Pan’s Labyrinth reaches the finest forms of mysterious fantasy, with roots in 1944 Franco Spain. In addition to depicting a horrific and fascinating fairy tale for adults, Pan’s Labyrinth manages to seamlessly portray an equally appalling fascist reality in the reshuffled life of young heroine Ofelia, deftly played by Ivana Baquero.
Upon encountering Ofelia, it is made immediately clear that she is not an ordinary girl-rather, she is some sort of distant royalty who sees and understands things that grown-ups don’t take the time to believe. She knows a fairy from an insect when she sees one. Ofelia’s initial short trips to fantasyland in her books and stories serve an understandable purpose: escaping her unfortunate, martial situation. In the commencement of the film, Ofelia and her excruciatingly pregnant mother are en route to the home of her stepfather, the fascist Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), a terrible and vicious man who needs Ofelia’s mother for the sole purpose of attaining a son to carry his name. Ofelia finds herself in a new militaristic household with house servants as her new family.
Ofelia discovers a second, separate life when she stumbles into the abandoned remains of a real labyrinth on her new stepfather’s property in the mountains. In this labyrinth, she discovers her alternate life and begins to follow the instructions given to her by the curious and ostensibly benign faun of the labyrinth. In accomplishing these tasks, she is promised a magnificent award-one worth repeatedly leaving behind her painfully ill mother and taking the risk of running into trouble with her stepfather.
The Mexican-born director Guillermo del Toro weaves together Ofelia’s two gruesome worlds smoothly, ultimately showing that the evils she fights in the labyrinth are not worse than those she faces in reality-namely cruelty, agony, loss and murder. Del Toro carefully reveals that the leftist guerillas hiding in the mountains have pervaded the Capitan’s house. He uses his time and uses it cautiously for effect, drawing out improvised amputations and torture scenes, most notably, the scene in which Capitan Vidal stitches together a four-inch-long cut on his face with no more anesthetic than a shot of whisky, which leaks out the gash before he can swallow it anyway. It is this fantastic attention to detail as well as inventive visual capabilities that makes del Toro’s work more significant and marks directorial growth in comparison to his prior failures, including the hardly celebrated work Hellboy.
Pan’s Labyrinth is easily in the top five films made in the last five years, largely because of its timelessness and beauty. It will undoubtedly be horrifying for audiences to watch such a small child endure heart-wrenching atrocities, but del Toro’s fine-tuned craftsmanship in this momentous film makes the suffering and tragedy in many ways very incredible.
Pan’s Labyrinth has two endings, both appropriately contributing to the evil of suffering and beauty of innocence-conflicting sensations one experiences throughout the film. Somewhere between brute fascism and a giant slimy toad, the right side wins and a coronation is realized, and that is very consoling-no matter how heartrending the sacrifices are.
