IMDb #123 Review: Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Source: Wikipedia

Because this movie keeps insisting (and demonstrating) that life is nothing like fairy tales, it paradoxically becomes the perfect fairy tale. Not "magical realism," the paper umbrella that literary types slink under to duck the shitstorm associated with genre fiction. Not that. Fantasy, real fantasy. Because everything about this movie is fantastic. Even the icky parts.

The backdrop is rural Spain, 1944, in the midst of civil war. The players are archetypes from fairy tales.

First, the most despicable stepfather in fiction. This brutal soldier shoots first and asks no questions because he knows all the answers and accepts no substitutes. The sickly stepmother, battered and pregnant, supports the strong husband who has done so much for her -- and to her.

Our heroine is the fey and lonely little girl who stumbles into a hidden world of magic. A world where she's a lost princess, where a creepy faun living in a stone maze gives her three vague tasks to complete before the full moon.

Like director Guillermo del Toro's obsession with monsters, there is strange beauty in ugliness. Brutal violence, torture, abuse, pregnancy? Crawling in mud, choking on blood? Facts of life, depicted in agonizing detail. Just because a movie features a child protagonist does not mean the movie is for children.

Amid the horror, both real and supernatural, beauty lurks. The music, the story, the acting, the effects (which have aged surprisingly well), and did I mention the music? Sublime. Rather than contradict, the beauty amplifies the horror, the horror the beauty.

I won't spoil any more than that.

But, by way of conversation, I have to ask. Does the magic only happen in the girl's head? You could interpret it that way. If you're a miserable bastard with a cynical streak as broad as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Different perspectives make for richer repeated viewings, which I humbly recommend.

You could mine this movie for symbolism till civilization collapses and the Underground Kingdom rises up to reclaim the planet from irradiated cockroaches.

119 minutes.