Grade: A-
Guillermo del Toro has won renown for a succession of solid—and successful—genre pictures (“Mimic,” “Blade II,” “Hellboy”), but while they’ve been unusually stylish audience-pleasers, it’s his more personal work that’s been truly impressive. His 1993 vampire picture “Cronos” and even more his extraordinary 2001 ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone” have been among the most haunting and evocative films to come from any director in recent years.
“Pan’s Labyrinth” joins them. It’s an astonishingly inventive portrait of childhood fears and hopes, an eerily beautiful modern fairy tale that truly merits the overused adjective magical. But it’s not a fairy tale in the toothless Disney sense; it’s one of the true Brothers Grimm sort—dark, frightening and intense—a fairy tale for adults.
In a way the film is a feminine counterpart to “Backbone.” In the earlier film, a young boy must survive a stay in a Spanish orphanage during the Civil War of the 1930s—a place threatened by fascist forces and housing not only some cruel and avaricious staff members but vengeful spirits as well. But “Labyrinth” is also a hallucinatory variant on “Alice in Wonderland.” Here the time is slightly later (1944), when a young girl named Ofelia (solemn, serious Ivana Baquero), a devotee of fantastic tales, comes with her ill mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to a remote outpost where her brutal stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), is leading a troop of Generalissimo Franco’s army trying to stamp out continuing guerrilla resistance. Exploring the area, Ofelia comes upon an ancient labyrinth, within which she meets the Greek god Pan (Doug Jones in an elaborate mask), who informs her that she is a princess who long ago left her underground kingdom for the realm above and died there, leaving her father grieving her absence and awaiting her return. Pan tells Ofelia that she must complete three tasks in order to return to her home and her father, and she embraces the challenge.
The tasks take Ofelia into a phantasmagorical world populated by extraordinary creatures (most notably a lean and hungry figure called the Pale Man, also played by Jones) and the intricately-designed and executed giants insects del Toro favors. But the fantasy elements are intertwined with several other plot threads, including Ofelia’s efforts to cure her bedridden mother, whose pregnancy is threatened by her illness, and by Vidal’s take-no-prisoners effort to trap the band of local resistance fighters—a mission that also involves his courageous housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu) and the local doctor (Alex Angulo).
What’s most remarkable about “Pan’s Labyrinth” is the dexterity with which del Toro shifts between the “real” world and Ofelia’s fantastical one. Of course, part of the explanation is that the film’s portrait of 1944 Spain itself has the nightmarish quality of a dark fantasy, and in Vidal it has a figure as monstrous as those found in the girl’s underground world. The two realms merge and blend almost imperceptibly, so that the picture draws you effortlessly into its strange, bewitching ambience.
Of course, achieving that result is no accident. It’s to be explained not only by del Toro’s sensitive writing and carefully calibrated direction, but from the extraordinary work of production designer Eugenio Caballero, costumer Lala Huete, and especially visual effects supervisor Everett Burrell and special effects and makeup supervisors Ryes Abades and David Marti. Together they’ve achieved an otherworldly feel that suffuses not just the “fantasy” sequences—though they are amazing—but the entire film. Praise is also due Guillermo Navarro, whose cinematography uses soft orange and blue pastels to enhance the atmosphere of the different narrative locales, and Javier Navarrete and Martin Hernandez, whose score and sound design work together to complement the mesmerizing visuals.
And the cast fit beautifully into the whole. Baquero makes a sturdy heroine who easily earns the audience’s empathy, while Lopez creates an engrossing portrait of pure villainy. Verdu provides an energetic portrait of real-life courage, and Gil one of touching fragility. But perhaps the performer most integral to the picture’s success is the heavily made-up Jones, who exhibits the physical grace of a dancer in bringing his unusual characters to life.
In the final analysis, however, it’s the vision of Guillermo del Toro, and his uncanny ability to realize it onscreen, that are the keys to this “Labyrinth.” A visual feast that also carries surprising emotional weight, it’s an unsettling child’s fantasy that’s also an adult horror story, and a film of such stunning imagination that it leaves most mega-budget effects spectaculars in the dust.