Film reviews

Lyricism shot through with grotesqueness; appalling brutality spawned out of egoistical coldness; and the vivid darkness of imagination contrasted with the bloody darkness of a war-torn reality in 1944 Spain, as rebels continue to hold pockets of resistance throughout the countryside – these things are deliberate strands (sometimes apparently separate, sometimes intertwining quite subtly) in a tale that is simple and yet rich.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark film with moments of shocking violence – there is a scene from which I had to turn away, when a young man attempting to speak up for his father is abruptly and savagely struck in the face with a wine bottle, hit so savagely that his face is quite literally smashed beyond repair before being shot. The father’s crime? He was suspected of being a rebel because he was carrying a recently fired shotgun with which he claimed he’d shot a rabbit for his dinner. The perpetrator of this attack is Capitán Vidal (played with terrifying believability by Sergi López) whose task it is to root out the rebels of this area in the wake of Franco’s victory, and who clearly has neither particular pleasure in nor any degree of empathy whatsoever towards other people’s pain. It is this lack of empathy that makes him the most frightening monster of this film – and believe me, there are other monsters here… some of which will leave an indelible impression upon your mind.

Vidal has had his heavily pregnant wife brought to his house at this camp, and the wife’s young daughter, Ofelia, of course accompanies her. Ofelia (played by one of the best child actors I’ve ever seen, Ivana Baquero) is the contrasting figure to all others in this film; she is a highly imaginative child who loses herself in the world of fairytales, and who bitterly resents the Capitán in place of her own father, who had died leaving his widow and child in that difficult and dangerous period of Spain’s history. Spurred on by the bleak emotional conditions that leave her increasingly disconnected from almost everyone there except her loving mother Carmen, who is struggling with an acutely dangerous pregnancy, Ofelia is pulled into an imaginary world of richly dark fairytale grotesqueries. In this fantasy, the nearby stone labyrinth (an amazing structure of baroque complexity and sombre wonder) is the entry to an underground world, a world in which she is the lost princess, and to which she can only return if she completes three tasks. The tasks are told to her by a smirking and strange creature called the faun, who looks like an ambiguously cunning and furtive vision birthed by Dali and given the finishing touches by Gaudi.

The film swings with disturbing echoes between this fantastical world and the all-too-brutal “real world”. The travails of Ofelia (in dealing with a monstrous toad and a child-eating nightmare figure who can only put its eyes into sockets on its palms if a child eats from the overflowing delicacies lavished upon the table at which it is seated) drive the fantasy element, and the perilous situation of the housekeeper Mercedes (played beautifully by Maribel Verdú) and the esteemed doctor, both of whom are aiding the rebels in hiding, is pivotal in maintaining a sense of urgency in the “real life” strand. Spoiler Matters reach a head when one of the rebels is captured, and when Carmen Vidal (sympathetically played by Ariadna Gil) dies in childbirth. This is no terrible tragedy for the capitán – he’d even instructed the doctor earlier that if it came to a choice, he was to save the unborn son at all costs – but it is possibly the last severing of the tenuous connection Ofelia has to reality.

The final confrontation between innocence and brutality is inevitable, and reality and fantasy face each other – the dark and subtly menacing world of the fantasy kingdom is reached only in the final and desolate moment when happiness must be imagined… for it will not be reached without imagination.

This is a stunning film. I mean that – it is quite literally stunning. It is not a comfortable film to watch, and there were at least two scenes that I thought were gratuitously violent, but it is shot most effectively with very beautiful lighting and camera work. The acting is superb, and the storyline is intricate and fascinating. I found it an engrossing film that made me think throughout about where it might be heading, and even after I’d finished watching it, I continued to mull over some questions raised in the film.

Spoiler I don't believe there’s any ambiguity in the film about where Ofelia’s fantasy world is intended to be real or not. The film contains many clues to show it isn’t real: for instance, the chalk-drawn rectangle on Ofelia’s bedroom wall (with supposedly “magical” chalk that should have opened an enchanted door and then faded away), the “faun that wasn't there” in the final scene between Ofelia and her step-father, and perhaps most tellingly, the complete ease with which Ofelia plunges into the notion of a complete escape from her life, for if the fantasy were true, it would mean leaving her beloved mother and the unborn brother whom she already adores. It is a wondrous fantasy as filled with perils and dangers and enchantments and ambiguities as are the influences upon Ofelia, and that’s what gives the labyrinth world such a morbid fascination, like ancient fairytales that have their roots in the mysteries and troubles of life itself.

I felt the film illustrated that evil men should not be praised or remembered; their legacy should not be passed on. Innocence and love must not be removed from our hearts, for that would leave us without fellow feeling for others, incapable of empathy and ignorant of what best becomes a human being. The concluding words spoken to the Capitán about his newborn son articulated that… but by far the most affecting scene in the film was the final tender and yet terrible shot of Ofelia, as the moonlight laid its path of soft enchantment upon the poignant tableau.

Very thought-provoking. The exquisite cinematography, the directing, the CGI and costuming, the acting are all exemplary. The marketing decision to call the English title Pan’s Labyrinth instead of the more literal Labyrinth of the Faun is misleading – the faun is not Pan, but a purely Spanish faun of dark faeryland, a darkly organic creature with an ambiguous presence. The film may well make you weep and wince – it did me. This is definitely not a film appropriate for children, but it has much to give to adult viewers who are not expecting straight fantasy and who can just manage to cope with the violence and darkness.