Pan's Labrynth

Pan's Labrynth is a visceral piece of filmmaking by director Guillermo del Toro. Set in Spain at the end of World War II as the fascist dictator Franco is consolidating his power. As the movie opens, a widowed woman and her teenage daughter travel to a forest military outpost where they are to live with the widow's new husband who is an army captain. The Captain's duty, and it seems his pleasure, is to track down and often torture a group of rebels in live in the forest.



The film superimposes the fantasy world of the young daughter over the harsh reality of the civil war. R rated for violence, as the movie progresses the violence becomes increasingly intense. It is a great piece of filmmaking, but it offers no relief from the violence of war and the sadism of the Captain, except through the escape found in the fantasies of the film's heroine.

Pan Labrynth has a gritty look to it as if it were made in an earlier age. The fantasy sequences owe more to the imagery of European surrealism than Hollywood fairy tales. The fairies, fauns, and fantastic monsters inhabit a world that echoes with shades Europe's pagan past. The film rests on a psychological foundation of lost fathers and princesses locked in castles that are common in ancient mythologies. This is a type of movie that would rarely come from inside the Hollywood mainstream.