Review #210: Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #65: Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Pan's Labyrinth is a Spanish film about a little girl who, during World War II, is taken by her mother to live with her new stepfather, a captain of the Spanish army. While there, she meets some fey creatures who claim that she is the reincarnated princess of their magical world, but in order to prove her worthiness she has to perform certain supernatural tasks before the next full moon.

I definitely remember seeing part of this movie when it first came out- I recall watching the beginning with a bunch of friends in someone's basement back in like 2007- but my memories are strange, because I definitely left partway through the film, yet so much of the latter half of this movie still felt really familiar to me. I don't know if I've just gathered some of the scenes through cultural osmosis, or if certain story beats were just so well-worn by now that they felt like the natural progression of a story like this.

While I don't think this was the best film I've ever seen, it's incredibly well-made and evocative. It certainly feels like a dark fairy tale, and I found both concurrent storylines (Ofelia's quest to become princess of the fey people, and the less-fanciful conflict between the general and the guerillas) to be equally compelling, and each time it would cut from one to the other I found myself wishing it would stick with the previous one so I could see where it was going! I expected the two to come together more in the end- like by having the general witness Ofelia speaking to the faun in the center of the labyrinth at the end, or for magic to play into the success of the guerrillas for example- but ultimately that's not what we got. I both like and dislike how it's made fairly clear at the end whether the magic was real or if it was all in Ofelia's head, but I think if I had to choose, I would rather it have been a little bit more ambiguous (which could have been easy, by just cutting off the last like ten seconds of the film).

But the makeup, the special effects, the sets- they're all top-notch, as were the performances. The IMDB trivia talks about how a ton of work went into these performances (including Doug Jones, a non-Spanish speaker, learning all of his lines and Ofelia's lines phonetically- even though his voice would be completely dubbed over by a Spanish actor- to make the production easier for everyone involved) and from the sounds of it, this film is very dear to director Guillermo Del Toro, as he made it at great expense to himself and did so with no regrets. I enjoyed it, maybe not as much as some, but I can absolutely appreciate the craftsmanship that went into it. I think I might have sort of missed the zeitgeist when it first came out, and so after a decade and a half of hearing how great it was it had a high bar to clear.

In any case, I definitely think this one is worth seeing if you haven't already.

(Oh, one last thing- can I just say how weird it is how The Pale Man is barely even in this film? He's all over the trailer, and he's referenced in all sorts of other media, but his entire screentime is like two minutes, and half of that time he's sitting motionless at a table. I was definitely expecting a LOT more of him.)

Overall Rating: 7/10 Stickbug Fairies

Three Degrees of Doug Jones: My brother knows Doug Jones! He's a friend-of-a-friend I guess, and a while back my brother once gave him a ride somewhere in Chicago. Apparently he's a super nice guy.