Film: Pan's Labyrinth
Release date: 21st May 2007
Certificate: 15
Running time: 119 mins
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Ivana Baquero, Ariadna Gil, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones
Genre: Fantasy/Drama/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Spain/Mexico
Fantasy, horror and historical drama may sound like an unlikely mix, but in Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s award-winning 2006 labour of love they are intertwined to enchanting and, at times, harrowing effect.
Set in Spain in 1944, five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth revolves around the experiences of Ofelia, an imaginative young girl who is battling to come terms with the death of her father. Along with her mother, Ofelia sets out to begin a new life at a remote military outpost headed by Captain Vidal, her cruel and violent stepfather who is tasked with wiping out a group of resistance fighters who continue to hold out against Franco’s rule.
Ofelia soon discovers an abandoned labyrinth close to her new home, an event that feeds her imagination, and allows her to escape into a fantasy world inhabited by fairies and a creaky old faun who claims that she is the long lost princess of an underground realm. The faun sets her three tasks to complete, each of which will require increasing courage and strength of will, in order to return to her rightful place alongside her father in his magical kingdom.
As Ofelia is drawn deeper into this surreal, at times nightmarish fantasy world, the distinctions between the harsh realities that surround her and her fairytale existence become ever more blurred. Troubled by the poor condition of her mother, who is ill and heavily pregnant with Vidal’s first child, the faun tells Ofelia to place a mandrake root in a bowl of milk under her mother’s bed and place two drops of her blood in the bowl every day. Miraculously, the concoction seems to make her mother better, but events soon conspire against Ofelia.
With the rebels closing in, and the Captain becoming more and more brutally unhinged, Ofelia has to choose between her fantasy life and a perilous reality that demands quick, decisive action. In a crucial twist, however, it is the very links to her fantasy world that enable her to confront the realities she had sought to escape…
Del Toro alludes to a complex web of literary, cinematic and artistic sources in celebrating the power of the imagination and resistance to tyranny. It’s undoubtedly an adult film, but one that draws on a childlike sense of wonder and curiosity.
Pan’s Labyrinth is beautiful to watch in parts, and Del Toro revels in contrasting the warm tones of the rural landscapes during the day against the colder deep blues of night. The arresting beauty of these contrasts makes the scenes of graphic, sadistic violence all the more unsettling. There is also a disturbing edge to some of the fantasy sequences, as though the horrors of the real world are bleeding into Ofelia’s imagination.
In one particularly memorable scene, a pale, menacing creature with eyeballs in the palms of its hands savagely devours two fairies. Del Toro has acknowledged his debt to Spanish artist Goya, and this scene is like a twisted fairytale take on Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son, pitched somewhere between Alice In Wonderland and Hellraiser. Elsewhere in the film, scenes of violence and torture recall elements of Goya’s Disasters Of War, a series of prints that throw the horrors of war into stark relief.
Del Toro’s eye for visual detail is clearly one of the film’s main strengths, but the performances by Ivana Baquero as Ofelia and Sergi Lopez as Captain Vidal are no less vital to the success of Pan’s Labyrinth. Baquero is instantly likeable as the strong-willed yet sensitive Ofelia, whereas Lopez makes you shiver and recoil the moment you first set eyes on him. Watching them on screen together is a bit like watching the Big Bad Wolf stalking Little Red Riding Hood, only in Pan’s Labyrinth Del Toro’s screenplay gives Baquero the room to develop into a less naive, more resourceful character.
Echoing postwar Spanish history, Pan’s Labyrinth shows that out of tragedy and brutality, hope and justice may ultimately prevail. That may sound a bit too much like a fairy tale, but it’s one that Del Toro laces with darkness and despair. JG
Set in Spain in 1944, five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth revolves around the experiences of Ofelia, an imaginative young girl who is battling to come terms with the death of her father. Along with her mother, Ofelia sets out to begin a new life at a remote military outpost headed by Captain Vidal, her cruel and violent stepfather who is tasked with wiping out a group of resistance fighters who continue to hold out against Franco’s rule.
Ofelia soon discovers an abandoned labyrinth close to her new home, an event that feeds her imagination, and allows her to escape into a fantasy world inhabited by fairies and a creaky old faun who claims that she is the long lost princess of an underground realm. The faun sets her three tasks to complete, each of which will require increasing courage and strength of will, in order to return to her rightful place alongside her father in his magical kingdom.
As Ofelia is drawn deeper into this surreal, at times nightmarish fantasy world, the distinctions between the harsh realities that surround her and her fairytale existence become ever more blurred. Troubled by the poor condition of her mother, who is ill and heavily pregnant with Vidal’s first child, the faun tells Ofelia to place a mandrake root in a bowl of milk under her mother’s bed and place two drops of her blood in the bowl every day. Miraculously, the concoction seems to make her mother better, but events soon conspire against Ofelia.
With the rebels closing in, and the Captain becoming more and more brutally unhinged, Ofelia has to choose between her fantasy life and a perilous reality that demands quick, decisive action. In a crucial twist, however, it is the very links to her fantasy world that enable her to confront the realities she had sought to escape…
Del Toro alludes to a complex web of literary, cinematic and artistic sources in celebrating the power of the imagination and resistance to tyranny. It’s undoubtedly an adult film, but one that draws on a childlike sense of wonder and curiosity.
Pan’s Labyrinth is beautiful to watch in parts, and Del Toro revels in contrasting the warm tones of the rural landscapes during the day against the colder deep blues of night. The arresting beauty of these contrasts makes the scenes of graphic, sadistic violence all the more unsettling. There is also a disturbing edge to some of the fantasy sequences, as though the horrors of the real world are bleeding into Ofelia’s imagination.
In one particularly memorable scene, a pale, menacing creature with eyeballs in the palms of its hands savagely devours two fairies. Del Toro has acknowledged his debt to Spanish artist Goya, and this scene is like a twisted fairytale take on Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son, pitched somewhere between Alice In Wonderland and Hellraiser. Elsewhere in the film, scenes of violence and torture recall elements of Goya’s Disasters Of War, a series of prints that throw the horrors of war into stark relief.
Del Toro’s eye for visual detail is clearly one of the film’s main strengths, but the performances by Ivana Baquero as Ofelia and Sergi Lopez as Captain Vidal are no less vital to the success of Pan’s Labyrinth. Baquero is instantly likeable as the strong-willed yet sensitive Ofelia, whereas Lopez makes you shiver and recoil the moment you first set eyes on him. Watching them on screen together is a bit like watching the Big Bad Wolf stalking Little Red Riding Hood, only in Pan’s Labyrinth Del Toro’s screenplay gives Baquero the room to develop into a less naive, more resourceful character.
Echoing postwar Spanish history, Pan’s Labyrinth shows that out of tragedy and brutality, hope and justice may ultimately prevail. That may sound a bit too much like a fairy tale, but it’s one that Del Toro laces with darkness and despair. JG
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