Pan's Labyrinth

A version of this review appeared in The Age, January 18, 2007.

It's 1944 -- a few years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Dust motes thicken the air as twelve-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) arrives in the woods at the northern end of the country, clutching her collection of storybooks under her arm. She's accompanied by her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil), whose new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), is an officer in Franco's Nationalist army, dedicated to exterminating the anti-fascist partisans who still lurk in the hills.

At a loose end in her oppressive new surroundings, Ofelia finds help of a kind when she wanders into a nearby stone labyrinth and encounters a seven-foot-tall faun (Doug Jones). From her new friend, she learns that she's really the princess of a magical underground kingdom and must prove her worth by confronting a succession of creepy creatures – first a gigantic bug-guzzling toad, then a faceless Pale Man (Jones again) as gaunt as a Renaissance anatomy illustration.

Like many modern fantasy films, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is in part a conscious reflection on the nature of fantasy, and its uses. The magical interludes don't correspond precisely with the above-ground struggle between Vidal's army and the partisans, but nor do they represent a simple denial of reality. Rather, it's as if Ofelia has brought her beloved fairy-tales to life as a way of redefining her situation in her own terms, and convincing herself that monsters can be defeated.

Thick with mud and blood, punctuated by storms and lit alternately by fire and the moon, Pan's Labyrinth is a triumph of texture and particularly of sound design, a crucial means of drawing together its separate plots. The limbs of the faun creak like the walls of the old mill where Vidal and his soldiers make their base; light glints audibly off a kitchen knife or a shaving razor, foreshadowing violence to come. The whirring of insects plays an important role, as does the ticking of Vidal's watch, an emblem of his insane rationality.

Interestingly, Ofelia's dream world proves more morally complex than its mundane counterpart. As a guide through the labyrinth, the faun (not strictly the Pan of classical myth) is presumably well-intentioned. But he's also a grotesque trickster, stooping in mock-servility, his horns curved like a jester's cap and bells. Vidal is far less ambiguous. Stiff-backed and humourless, he's fascist patriarchy incarnate, a gloating villain easily straightforward enough for a children's book (say, one by Roald Dahl).

Pan's Labyrinth may be most enjoyable simply as a parade of fearsome wonders, though for adults much of the symbolism is transparent enough. The damp passages that Ofelia crawls through are explicitly associated with the womb, and the entire film turns on the fate of her unborn brother. Vidal, for his part, regards women as beneath notice, and his obsession with the birth of his heir amounts to a violation of the safe space shared by mother and child.

Ofelia is clear that Vidal is anything but her real father; the puzzle she never even tries to solve is why he should have become part of her family in the first place. "One day you'll understand," is the best her mother can tell her. There's no reason why the glamour of evil couldn't be shown from a child's point of view – think, for example, of the feline softness and slyness of Robert Mitchum's preacher in The Night of the Hunter (1955).

But rather than complicate matters, Pan's Labyrinth relies on the easy satisfactions of melodrama. At the climax, what we get is a battle between heroes and villains, allied with the story of a suffering innocent whose vivid imagination ultimately gives her a means of escape. For all Del Toro's craft, there's something suspicious about the movie's double game – as if the audience were asked to regress to a state of uncritical innocence, while remaining hardened enough to tolerate all the gore.