Movie Review - Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Pan's Labyrinth

It was late 2006 when I first saw the trailer for Pan's Labyrinth. I was attending my first showing of Casino Royale (which rocks, by the way) and this is the only preview I explicitly remember seeing before Casino Royale. If you knew just how anxious I was to see that movie, it would be pretty impressive that I would remember this preview in the midst of all that anticipation. Upon viewing this movie recently, I see why exactly that is.

Pan's Labyrinth is classified on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) as belonging to five different genres, with the top two being Drama and Fantasy. For this review, I'm going to briefly inspect the effectiveness of the working-together of both components of this movie.

Drama

The story of Pan's Labyrinth is certainly a dark and grim one. A young girl named Ofelia moves to the countryside with her expecting mother to live at a small military outpost led by the vile Spanish Army Captain Vidal. It doesn't take but five minutes of looking at this guy to get that, so I don't consider that to be too much of a spoiler. I can't recall a single funny moment, although there may have been a few relatively lighthearted ones, and most of the scenes seem to be cast in a shadow, both figuratively and literally. There's even an element of romance for those interested. This is most certainly not a feel-good movie, but that doesn't mean it isn't effective, because, oh boy, it is.

Fantasy

If I had to mention in passing what this movie was to someone, I would most likely call it an "adult fairy tale," as it has been called by many others before. This movie may be rated R and have plenty of adult themes you would expect to see in such a movie, but it is a very intriguing blend of several different fairy tales, with Alice In Wonderland coming to mind first. The movie just looks absolutely fantastic--Guillermo del Toro does an amazing job of blending the real-world Spanish countryside with the fairy-tale world that Ofelia discovers.

It is the integration of these two elements that makes the movie so immensely watchable. While the wonderful fantastical bits are often interrupted by the main storyline that brings us back down to earth, these often-depressing dramatic bits are interrupted by Ofelia's quest in Pan's Labyrinth. While this is definitely NOT a film for people who don't like to read subtitles (yes, it's foreign), hate dark movies, or don't care for violence too much, it most certainly is a must-see for everyone else. Once you get past the adult nature of the movie, what you have left is a moral that even a child could embrace, and an ending that leaves you feeling several different things at once.

Comments? Questions? Please feel free to ask!

Next review: Life Is Beautiful (1997)

Yes, it's another foreign one.