What do you get when you mix a 12-year old girl with a spirited fantasy life, a bed-ridden pregnant mother, the Spanish resistance, and a sadistic Army Captain with daddy issues? You get a magical movie that is beautifully shot, thought provoking, and shifts so seamlessly between fantasy and the brutality of war, that you forget to notice which is which.
Pan’s Labyrinth is a fairy tale about a lonely bookwormish 12-year old girl Ofelia who creates a fantasy life just as harrowing as her real life… a life which consists of living in a Spanish military outpost with her nasty-mean stepfather who is charged with murdering Spanish resistance fighters living in the woods. Between a throwing up giant toad, a Faun that would scare the pants off of Mr. Tumnus, shape shifting tinker bells, and the “pale man� who screws his eyeballs into his palms in order to see, Ofelia must complete a set of tasks in order to become a princess and preside over the underworld. However in the end, it’s Ofelia’s choices in the real world that decide her fate.
A truly glorious movie that deals with the real world issue of the morality of obeying a direct order while simultaneously asking otherly-world questions regarding the afterlife. A must see!
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