Movie Review: Pan's Labyrinth

Movie Review: Pan's Labyrinth

Written by Ernesto Burden
Published February 22, 2007

Guillermo Del Toro is one of the best storytellers working in movies right now in terms of capturing deep truths within myth and symbol through jarring, beautiful images. Pan's Labyrinth is beautiful and captivating. The movie is in Spanish, directed by Del Toro, who did The Devil's Backbone (another great Spanish language film – one of my favorite ghost stories ever) as well as some high-budget English language movies like Hellboy and Blade II.

The story is set in northern Spain in 1944, just after the Civil War. A mother and her daughter, Ofelia, come to an old mill in the country to be with the mother's new husband, the sadistic Captain Vidal, whose soldiers are tasked with hunting down the last of the resistance fighters hiding in the hills. Ofelia is enamored of fairy stories, and encounters a real fairy, who leads her through an ancient labyrinth in the woods by the mill, where she meets a faun who tells her she's the long lost daughter of the king of the underworld and sends her on three quests.

The story follows two intertwined plot lines – Ofelia's magical quests and the brutal efforts of Captain Vidal. The mixture reads very much in tone like Latin American literary magical realism – if the works of Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges or Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) make sense to you, this one will too. For me, this has always come down to whether a reader or viewer cares whether the story formalizes whether (and which) metaphors and symbols in the story are "real" or not. Without this formalization, some find the story line incoherent – a sentiment that seems sort of Manichean to me… why insist on absolute separation of matter and spirit (metaphorically or literally speaking)? In a story, especially this sort of story, I tend to care more about whether the plot elements are "really true" than whether the author spells out in some technical manner if they "really happened."

The parallel story lines contrast the brutality of human evil and the sometimes impersonal evil of nature, along with a metaphysical hope that underlies the structure of all things. It was this hope that made an extremely dark movie different from the rash of nihilistic horror films being made right now – in the end there's hope and redemption.

Del Toro is also an amazing image maker – the pictures he paints with every scene in the movie are beautiful – even the dark, scary ones. This is a movie you could watch with the volume off and still be entirely engrossed.

The pacing is perfect. Ivana Baquero is captivating as Ofelia and Sergi Lopez is dark, bestial, and somehow deeply compelling as Captain Vidal. Absolutely see it.