Film Notes: Pan's Labyrinth

You can always count on Guillermo del Toro to make an interesting movie. His weakest pictures still offer striking images and ideas worth chewing on, while his strongest have a knack for getting their harpoons in the brain and hanging on for dear life. Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto Del Fauno) may be his finest hour. del Toro expertly interweaves a young girl’s journey into a fairy realm with her family’s fraught life in Francoist Spain, where the mystic informs the real, and the real informs the mystic, in their cruelties, nobilities, and wonders.

It’s a spiritual successor to his 2001 gothic horror film The Devil’s Backbone, and also, arguably, an indirect sequel—the leads of The Devil’s Backbone appear among the Maquis rebels, and can be read as reprising their roles. Pan’s Labyrinth sees del Toro shift his players, moving from adolescent boys to a younger girl and the adults who surround her; his spectres, with ghosts giving way to the fae; and his setting, shifting from an isolated orphanage to the deep woods. He tunes his thematic observations, particularly on the necessity of connection and care and the fundamental, inescapable weakness of fascism—a soul-eating bundle of lies that makes the vicious and the empty feel strong.

Doug Jones’ child-eating Pale Man may be more overtly nightmare-inducing than Sergi López’s sneering fascist Captain Vidal, but at least the Pale Man doesn’t hide his cruelty and malice behind puffed-up pretensions of honor and nobility. Jones’ enigmatic Faun and Maribel Verdú’s thoroughly decent partisan fighter, Mercedes, though wildly different, share an attention to consequences and a commitment to their codes. Every player is vividly realized by del Toro and impeccably performed by the ensemble—none more so than Ivana Baquero as the protagonist, Ofelia.

Ofelia is one of 21st-century cinema’s great child heroines, a bright, good-hearted kid growing up in a dire time who seeks the fantastic both as an escape from her suffocating home life and to do right by her ailing mother, Carmen (Adriana Gil). Ofelia’s quest becomes her coming-of-age, a tale of the necessity of seeing beyond yourself. Baquero plays her beautifully, capturing the whole of childhood, from adventurousness to carelessness to astonishing moral and physical courage. It’s superb and unforgettable work.

And, of course, this is a Guillermo del Toro picture. The creatures and critters are superb. They’re the fae, in all their otherworldliness, charming (the fairies who befriend Ofelia), terrifying (the Pale Man. Good god, the Pale Man), and wise but fundamentally inhuman (the Faun).

Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie to get lost in.