Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del Fauno) (R) ★★★★

A product of singular imagination by a filmmaker at the height of his prowess, Pan's Labyrinth is the kind of gothic fairy tale most movies are not--at once wildly fantastical yet elegantly rich in reality, magically inspiring yet profoundly disturbing.

Story

Set during the Spanish Civil War of the 1940s—a favorite area of exploration for writer-director Guillermo del Toro—the story follows dreamy 11-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) as she’s uprooted and relocated to a remote military outpost when her sickly mother (Ariadna Gil) marries the wantonly cruel camp commander, Captain Vidal (Sergei Lopez). With the compassionate but secretive housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu) as the closest thing to a friend she has in the oppressive environment, Ofelia escapes into a richly textured fantasy world. She follows a dragonfly she believes is a fairy into a landscaped but neglected garden maze she recasts as the lair of the goatish godling Pan (Doug Jones). He tells her she’s the last heir to a magical otherworldly kingdom and charges her with several tasks to help her reclaim her birthright. As her personal world grows more and more grim—the impending birth of her half-brother threatens her mother’s health, her step-father grows colder and colder in his bid to crush the resistance, and Mercedes’ hidden agenda places her in jeopardy as well—Ofelia soon finds herself tangling with hideous monsters both imagined and all too real, often having difficulty distinguishing which is the more dangerous.

Acting

The astonishingly real performance of the amazing young Spanish actress Baquero as Ofelia anchors the film firmly in both its real world and fantasy environments, as only the convincing imagination of a child could. Lopez is an equally compelling discovery as the callous Vidal, pitiless, vicious and malevolent while still remaining believably human throughout. He’s unblinking in his depiction of a thoroughly vile and cruel man but avoids any aspect of cartoonish evil. And Verdu (Y Tu Mama Tambien) as Mercedes is a wonder as well, with her remarkably expressive face unlimited by the film’s Spanish language barriers. Kudos, too, to Doug Jones, a whisper-thin actor who specializes in “creature” roles (he’s played Abe Sapien in del Toro’s Hellboy and will be the Silver Surfer in the Fantastic Four sequel), who somehow magically delivers fully-formed performances as both the faun Pan and the freakish Pale Man through layers and layers of latex.

Direction

Pan's Labyrinth is unquestionably Guillermo del Toro’s finest film work to date, as pure an artistic vision as is likely to be committed to celluloid. He wisely worked outside the Hollywood system in his native Spain to bring his dark tale to life. The story exists in that shadowy netherworld between childhood and adulthood, innocence and awareness of the world’s more sinister nature, and its characters and themes are explored in ways that no mainstream film would ever allow. On the surface, the trappings are Tim Burton-esque, but the dark corners Pan's Labyrinth peers into are grim and gloomy indeed; del Toro is never afraid to delve into the murkiest of directions that, to audiences used to more conventional movies, are heart-wrenching, even gut-churning, but ultimately emotionally honest and, in unexpected ways, as immensely satisfying as they are haunting. The film is the announcement of the complete arrival of a major filmmaker, and we can only hope that the qualities del Toro brings to this work do not get lost in the maze of Hollywood for future films.

Bottom Line

Hollywood.com rated this film 4 stars.