Starring: Ivana Baquero, Sergi Lopez, Doug Jones, Maribel Verdu
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Category: IIB (Spanish)
Pan's Labyrinth begins with several black Bentleys travelling through rural Spain in 1944, a convoy carrying a woman and her daughter to an outpost where the former's soldier-husband is stationed. Inside, a heavily pregnant Carmen reproaches the young Ofelia's choice of reading, taking a heavy volume from the girl's hands. 'Fairy tales? You're too old to be filling your head with such nonsense,' she says.
It's a view many would share - but one that Guillermo del Toro challenges with what may be the most powerful film of his career. Nominally a story about Ofelia's travels and travails in a mythical world filled with fauns and ogres, Pan's Labyrinth is - like del Toro's The Devil's Backbone (2001) - a thinly veiled metaphor about how innocence and idealism should prevail even amid tyranny, and illustrates vividly how imagination can empower the powerless.
And tyrannical times they are for Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who is forced to adapt to a new life in the war-torn countryside and a new father in the shape of Vidal (Sergi Lopez), a Francoist army captain who uses sadistic methods to flush Republicans from the woods and help create a 'new and cleansed Spain'. As Falangist horror unravels around her, Ofelia seeks solace in a bizarre netherworld, where she befriends a faun (the heavily made-up Doug Jones).