Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ivana Baquero, Doug Jones
Spanish with English subtitles
From the time Lewis Carroll first sent Alice down the rabbit hole there has been a fascination for young girls visiting fantasy worlds, and those stories inevitably draw comparisons with the aforementioned Alice’s adventures. This year alone we have seen MIRROR MASK from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean and, more recently, Terry Gilliam’s TIDELAND. Now Guillermo del Toro (CRONOS, HELLBOY) presents his take on subject.
PAN’S LABYRINTH (El Laberinto del Fauno) is set in 1944, at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Young Ofélia and her pregnant mother, Carmen, are sent to a remote country outpost. Carmen’s new husband, and father of the expectant baby, is a captain in Franco’s army battling against insurgents. Near the mill where they are living Ofélia is lead into a maze where she finds a faun, who tells her she is a lost princess and has to complete three tasks to be returned to her kingdom.
Like both MIRROR MASK and TIDELAND, this story is essentially about a girl who withdraws into a fantasy world in order to escape the harsh realities of the world around her, with all three films involving sick and/or dying parents. The idea that these children are using their fantasy worlds to escape ‘reality’ is a particularly adult view and one that comes with the loss of innocence.
In MIRROR MASK, which is aimed at a teenage audience of the protagonist’s age, childhood innocence is already fading, and the escaping aspect is more clearly visible. In that story, Helena does not seem to fully believe in what she is seeing and the dangers of the alternative world are not a real threat, much like in a dream. In the other two films, which are made for adult audiences, especially PAN’S LABYRINTH, the children are fully aware of the perils of the world around them, but it is their innocence that protects them, and their alternate worlds are integrated into the ‘real’ world. For them there is no separation between the two, and this is more apparent in PAN’S LABYRINTH, especially during a scene involving the discovery of a mandrake root.
The historical drama of PAN’S LABYRINTH is filled with harsh brutality that is often graphic, causing the more sensitive souls in the audience to look away. It is a dark film, visually and not just metaphorically, which resembles the paintings of Goya, whereas TIDELAND is more akin to the works of Edward Hopper, full of light but with a sinister foreboding.
The fantasy creatures in this new film are certainly scarier than those of MIRROR MASK. Both the faun, or Pan, and the bizarre Pale Man are both played by a heavily costumed and made-up Doug Jones (Abe Sapien in HELLBOY). Even the fairies have attitude. The faun, although there to help the Ofélia, is not always friendly, and according to Greek legend Pan was not of a genial disposition. He hated being woken from his sleep and would let out a terrible cry causing fear, or panic, in those around him. Pan was also quite the hedonist when it came wine and women, which made him popular with the pagans, who also worshipped him as their god of nature, but the early Christians demonised him (literally) and used his part-goat features as their representation of Satan.
The worldly level of the story does not have a happy ending but the fantasy thread does, which does make it a satisfying film, because both outcomes are true to their realities.
The cast is unknown to those unfamiliar with Spanish cinema, but the performances are excellent and, like her TIDELAND counterpart, the young Ivana Baquero carries the film on her delicate shoulders.
Although HELLBOY is a great comic book movie, this is probably the director’s best film to date. Not only is it made in his mother tongue but it is a more personal project and a revisiting of the themes of his previous film, THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE.
Highly recommended for fans of quality fantasy/horror.
PAN’S LABYRINTH is out on November 24 through Optimum Releasing.