Sometimes the hardest reviews to write are for the movies which you just know are a yard faster than anything else you've seen. For me, PAN'S LABYRINTH is the most memorable, inventive, emotionally and visually scarring movie I have seen in 2006. The (in)famous UK reviewer, Mark Kermode, stood up before the screening and called the movie "the CITIZEN KANE of fantasy cinema". This made me, if anything, more sceptical about the film. Not because I don't value his opinion but because I hate someone laying this amount of hype on the shoulders of a movie just as I'm about to see it. How on earth could the movie possibly live up to such a description?Short answer: it does. And then some. The problem is that I can describe how amazing the production design is; how elegant the editing; how atmospheric the photography; but I cannot make you feel the sense of complete immersion in a world that is threatening and brutal and evil. And be very clear, this is no kids movie. It inflicts much cruelty on its audience - forcing you to flinch at scenes of torture, body-horror and death. The cruelty steps beyond the immediate violence, though - it manifests itself in what I interpreted to be an incredibly nihilistic central message: the world is barbarous and cruel and evil acts may be punished but the innocent will also die. Worse still, there is no real refuge in childhood stories of magic and fairies. Barbarous cruelty also dominates the fantasy world and its rules are arbitrary and demanding. Maybe I am taking this too far: there is a glimmer of hope at the end. We are, after all, moral agents: we are able to do the right thing. But to one interpretation, there is no tangible benefit to doing so.
But back to the nuts and bolts. PAN'S LABYRINTH is the new film by director Guillermo del Toro (HELLBOY, THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE). It is set in Spain just after the civil war has ended, but as World War Two is still raging. A young girl who loves fairy-tales is travelling into the countryside with her heavily pregnant mother. Her stepfather is a vain, misogynistic, sadistic Fascist army officer who sees her mother as a vehicle to deliver the son he desires. The step-daughter is tempted by a faun into thinking that if she can just carry out three dangerous tests in a fantasy world she will be acknowledged as an immortal fairy princess and be spirited away to live with her dead father.
Finally, as with all truly magical cinematic experiences, it's really hard for me to explain why this movie affected me so much. I can only urge you to try and catch it at the cinema even if you wouldn't normally go for fantasy cinema. It is rare to find a movie that is so engrossing, so horrifying and yet so beautifully rendered.
PAN'S LABYRINTH played Cannes and London's Frightfest, 2006. It is currently on release in Spain, Mexico, France and Serbia. It opens in Belgium, Italy and the UK this weekend and in Australia, Russia and Singapore next weekend. The film opens in Canada and the US on December 29th. It opens in Norway in January, Germany in February, Japan in April and Turkey in May.
