Pan's Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro

Iona Firouzabadi
20 December 2006

This is a film about violence. It is about Good as a weak force in a dark time. It is sewn from the material of nightmares, not the stuff of fantasy. Its trailers and marketing misrepresent it. It is not just a genre film, it is not simply a black fairytale - it is a brutal, bleak and shocking comment on Man's most negative capacities.

The majority of the film takes place in the 'real' world of Franco's Spain and not in the Underworld of Pan's labyrinth. Viewed through unremittingly gloomy cinematography and the eyes of a little girl (Ofelia - Ivana Baquero), we see into the dark heart of Fascism. We see a Spain within living memory where there is no redemption for the living, where Priests dine with murderers and where the innocence of childhood is no protection against death. There are few concessions to Hollywood here.

Pan's Labyrinth subverts the conventions of children's stories. Ofelia's father is dead and her mother (Ariadna Gil) has remarried out of loneliness. Ofelia has a very, very wicked stepfather (Sergi López) - a captain in the Fascist army. As the film opens she and her pregnant mother are traveling to his camp in the forest. As they near their destination Ofelia meets a Jurassic sized insect in the woods. This might terrify most little girls, but the dark-eyed Ofelia doesn't see a giant bug, but a fairy in exoskeletal form. This creature guides her into a labyrinth that is both a real, physical place in the wood and a supernatural realm. Here she encounter's Pan (Doug Jones), an enigmatic faun - both monstrous and beautiful - who steers her destiny. He tells her she is the lost Princess of the Underworld and sets her three tasks to complete before the full moon. At each step Ofelia encounters a monster. The first is a vile, vast and vomiting toad, which sits in the bole of a tree and saps its life. The second is a creation of such imaginative horror that Hieronymus Bosch and HR Giger would salivate over it - an in-human Pale Man (Doug Jones), blind of face, with red eyes in his talon hands. The third monster is Ofelia's own stepfather, who pursues her into the Labyrinth like a preternaturally calm version of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

He is sociopathic - without compassion or remorse. The first act of hyper-violence within the film is committed by him, and is on a level with that seen in Scorsese's Casino or Gaspar Noe's Irreversible. He is not a conventional villain. He is a nexus of brutality, an embodiment of a wider, human evil - not a mere aberration but an expression of the world's commonplace violence. In this film the Good too commit acts of startling viciousness, and birth as well as death is a bloody affair - so violence bookends human life.

The moral planes of Pan's Labyrinth slide between ambiguity and nihilism. We are not given the usual visual signals of Good and Evil that a genre fantasy film would hand us - there is no Gandalf the White. Pan himself is a terrifying bestial vision, a faun very far from Mister Tumnus. The fairies morph between insects and oily little creatures - not a Tinkerbell to be seen. Ofelia's dress echoes that in Arthur Rackham's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland - but where Alice is blonde and clad in blue, Ofelia is brunette and wears bottle green. Everything is a little darker and there is no right and proper and normal side to Ofelia's looking glass - each side is twisted. In two scenes banquets are laid for monsters, both within and without the labyrinth - one for the Pale Man, one for the Fascists.

Ofelia's only friend is Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), her stepfather's housekeeper and a clandestine member of the republican resistance. There is an intriguing and strong feminist streak to the film. Guillermo del Toro's women are ones Pedro Almodóvar could be proud of.

This is a film that lingers in the mind, as dreams do, yet, like a dream, its structure is not always coherent or complete. It is more a sequence of vivid experiences than a narrative. Its design and atmosphere are remarkable, yet it is surprisingly prosaic in many of its shot choices. It does not, for instance, have the visual perfection of a film like Amélie. Even with the appearance of Pan and the puncturing shock of its ultra-violent scenes, its pace is ponderous - until we meet the Pale Man. But its score is melancholy and magical and its denouement is bleak brilliance. Despite its flaws, Pan's Labyrinth is a masterpiece.