Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
In post–civil war Spain, 10-year-old Ofelia moves with her pregnant mother to live under the control of her cruel stepfather. Drawn into a mysterious labyrinth, she meets a faun who reveals that she may be a lost princess from an underground kingdom. To return to her true father, she must complete a series of surreal and perilous tasks that blur the line between reality and fantasy.
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34 films that influenced Pan's Labyrinth
What critics say influenced Pan's Labyrinth
Pan also evokes Bu/+/-uel -- sometimes very directly, such as in the image of Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) with a straight razor in hand and a cigarette in his mouth, deliberately recalling Un Chien Andalou (1927) -- but more gracefully, more organically.
A haunting heartbreaker, "Labyrinth" belongs in a class with director Bernard Rose's spellbinding psychological thriller "Paperhouse" and Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise's "The Curse of the Cat People" as one of the few films that dares to enter a troubled child's mind to sympathetically sort out the contents.
With his bull build, haughtily handsome face and eyes like gun slits, Lopez forms one of the defining portrayals of fascist machismo, up near Jean-Louis Trintignant in “The Conformist.”
It's as if del Toro had uncovered the darker aspects of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland adventures, the dormant elements ignored by Disney and television (though not by Jan Svankmajer in his disturbing 1988 gem, Alice), and found a home for them in his own fractured fairy tale.
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A haunting heartbreaker, "Labyrinth" belongs in a class with director Bernard Rose's spellbinding psychological thriller "Paperhouse" and Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise's "The Curse of the Cat People" as one of the few films that dares to enter a troubled child's mind to sympathetically sort out the contents.
The black-and-white "Fando y Lis" -- a film about an ill-fated journey to "the magical city of Tar" that may have influenced fellow Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's dark "Alice in Wonderland" update, "Pan's Labyrinth" -- is serviceable but contrasty, and exhibits some distracting strobing during scenes of motion.
I don’t know how you will value the imagination of Pan’s Labyrinth against the quasi-documentary realism of the only film I know as a touchstone, Victor Erice’s great The Spirit of the Beehive.
Ivana Baquero, her face both credulous and wise before its time, seems ideally poised between the childish and the adult, and that makes her a fine successor to Ana Torrent, whose youthful performances in “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973) and “Raise Ravens” (1976) are indispensable to the cinema of modern Spain.
Leave the political allegory to a film like Pan's Labyrinth (where it's only somewhat successful, largely because it's so unavoidable, and I believe this helps to make my point).
Its closest relative is Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, though del Toro avoids the confounding pretension of that earlier work in favor of his own mordant witticism.
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The Faun/Pan (Doug Jones, Hellboy) even speaks in much the same manner as the Beast (Jean Marais) in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946).
If you recall the chills that ran down your spine and the surreal humor that tickled your brain in the presence of " Alice in Wonderland ," "Little Red Riding Hood" or " The Wizard of Oz " when you were a child (or, later, in the nightmarish dream-films of Luis Bunuel , Jean Cocteau, F.W. Murnau or David Cronenberg ), you'll discover those sensations once again, buried deep in the heart of "Pan's Labyrinth."