pan’s labyrinth

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

***1/2

With numerous positive reviews, and an admittedly intriguing subject matter for anyone who grew up with films such as Labyrinth, the Dark Crystal and other muppet-driven fantasies, one might be forgiven for anticipating that Pan’s Labyrinth would be a more adult version of those films. Despite publicity and reviews which have focused on the highly imaginative fantasy elements, however, Guillermo del Toro has created a film which is to say the least surprising, and in which the fantasy world is perhaps of secondary significance in terms of the plot and underlying message to the human one in which it is set.

In the film Ofelia, a young girl, travels to the country with her heavily pregnant mother to stay with her stepfather Captain Vidal, an officer in the post-civil war Spanish army (the film is set in 1944 – at one point we hear that the allies have landed at Normandy). The Captain’s mission is to supress resistance fighters still active in the countriside by whatever means necessary, a task about which he clearly has no qualms. He is a cruel and ruthless man, preoccupied with his desire for an heir, who views Ofelia with barely concealed disdain. Ofelia, a lover of fairy tales, escapes her unpleasant surroundings when she encounters a series of magical creatures who lead her into another world in the forest near the Captain’s military outpost.

And so the scene appears to be set early on for a somewhat whimsical tale about the power of imagination and the value of childhood. Director del Toro, who also directed the interesting but flawed Hellboy, has other ideas, however. The film rapidly takes a much darker and more serious path which leaves no doubt that this is a film for adults, or at the very least not a film for children.

The most unexpected aspect of the film has nothing to do with it’s fantasy elements – most surprising is the violence, which recurs with grinding regularity from early in the piece and which is both realistic and played out for excruciatingly long periods of time. Del Toro is clearly not someone who believes that the worst aspects of violence are better implied and thereby left to his audience’s imagination. Instead he portrays some startling brutality (almost exclusively of the human-on-human variety) in full, and uncomfortably believable, detail. This aspect of the film emphasises the savage nature of the post-civil war period and Franco’s regime, but also sits rather uncomfortably with the fantasy elements: it is hard to maintain a suspension of disbelief regarding fauns, fairies and magic kingdoms when the terrible, bloody ordinariness of real-world human cruelty is driven home with an almost masochistic regularity.

Nevertheless the fantasy world into which Ofelia escapes is expertly realised by the director. The central character is a faun (shown on the poster above, and made believable with some excellent special effects) who serves as both a guide and driving force for Ofelia’s journey. The faun is deliberately ambiguous – it is never clear whether he can be trusted, or what precisely his motivations are. Ofelia encounters various other creatures as she undertakes a series of tasks – at times there is a distinct conventional fairy tale flavour to these episodes, but at others the tone is more akin to something created by HR Giger or HP Lovecraft than the Brothers Grimm.

However much she escapes into the mysterious world she discovers, Ofelia is always dragged back to the harsh realities of the human world. The Captain’s character has the burden of representing many negative forces – he is the hostile stepfather, the ultimate representative of Franco’s fascist regime, the wilfully unimaginative antithesis of the world of magic, and the worst side of humanity, filled with violence, cruelty and the drive to live up to twisted ideals he has developed for himself. In this sense he is arguably more of a classic fairy tale character than any magical creature – unambiguously malevolent and powerful, he stalks through the film filling it with a growing sense of dread. Equally loaded with symbolism are the resistance fighters and the Spanish locals who support them despite extreme personal danger. They are the representatives of freedom of thought, courage, kindness, and the protectors that Ofelia’s cruel stepfather and helpless mother are not.

In the end the battle between the Captain and the resistance fighters is the film’s great strength as a drama, but its weakness as a fantasy. It is interesting to reflect that the film would have been quite adequate with no fantasy elements at all – del Toro creates a powerful sense of the period, and drags the audience into the fear and desperation of a fight against a seemingly unstoppable fascist regime. There are several memorable scenes where members of the resistance have opportunities to walk away from their fight and choose not to do so, preferring death to surrender.

Unfortunately, the viciousness of the fight detracts from the magical world Ofelia experiences. The director does his best to weave the two together, but the fantasy elements do little to progress the story. A better film would perhaps have contained less brutality and allowed the audience some room to relax slightly and engage with its extaordinary and imaginative parts. One suspects that del Toro is not the compromising type, however, and as such we are left with an intriguing but ultimately slightly disjointed experience.