Pan’s Labyrinth

Starring: Sergi Lopez, Ariadna Gil, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones, Alex Angulo, Roger Casamajor, Ivana Massague

Written by: Guillermo del Toro

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro

Distributor: Picturehouse Films

Rated: R

The Pale Man with eyes in the palms of his hands grotesquely bites the heads off of insect-like fairies by the side of a sinister dinner table. It’s a disgusting sight, but it doesn’t come as a surprise. There’s been quite a bit that’s come before this moment in Pan’s Labyrinth that firmly establishes the film as fantasy horror. Earlier on in the film, a young, dark-haired Alice in a decidedly bleak wonderland has climbed into the rancid heart of a tree and administered magically emetic flies to a giant toad that causes it to vomit itself flat so that she can pick a key out of its entrails. This isn’t pleasant, dreamy-eyed kid’s stuff, so if you’re waiting for the next Harry Potter movie, this ISN’T it.

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Blade II) weaves a brutal story somewhere between the horrors of the natural world and the horrors of the supernatural. In rural Spain 1944, an imaginative young girl names Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) has moved with her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to an old mill that serves as a military encampment. She is asked to accept the military base as her home and its Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) as her father. Amidst the horrors of war, Ofelia finds a garden labyrinth behind her new home ruled over by a terrifying Faun (Doug Jones) who sets Ofelia on a path to rediscover her heritage as a magical princess. The magical world beyond the old mill may all be in Ofelia’s head as she tries to cope with the stress of her life, or it could be something ever more real.

Guillermo del Toro puts together a fascinating story that’s weighted substantially heavier in reality than Picturehouse Films has been advertising. Dark fantasy sparingly plays against a very dark reality. The soldiers are struggling to eliminate the guerilla rebels hidden in the dark Spanish countryside. There’s some extremely grizzly imagery there. Rebels and suspected rebels are shot at point blank range with Lugers, then shot a few more times to ensure death. There is torture. We see a knife inserted into a mouth to slice open a cheek along the lip line. It’s terrifyingly savage stuff, but it serves to set up the villainy of Sergi Lopez as the merciless Captain Vidal and it shows the ruthless, barbaric world Ofelia escapes from when she visits the realm of fantasy that just might be in her mind.

Not that the fantasy in this film is much of a pleasant alternative to the earthly horror. The magic here plays out less like the standard, sanitized fairy tale stuff normally found in big budget films. Bits of the magic the Faun asks Ofelia to work sound much more deeply inspired by authentic sources than one would expect out of a traditional fantasy film. Ophelia’s placing mandrake root in a shallow bowl of milk underneath her mother’s bed and feeding it drops of her own blood to help her mother’s health during illness or crossing over into distant places with doors she’s drawn in chalk has an emotional effect that goes way beyond the basics of what is seen onscreen. Guillermo del Toro could’ve gone to Simon’s Necronomicon for some of the inspiration here. Whether del Toro is exploring fantasy or reality, the visuals in Pan’s Labyrinth are amazing, The acting is equally impressive. This is a movie worth seeing. It might even be a movie worth studying. VS