Pan's Labyrinth: A Review

Pan's Labyrinth: A Review

           When I began searching for a film to review, I was set on a few specific criteria. I wanted to review a film that I had never seen before and knew very little about, that has a good reputation among film critics, and that I was genuinely interested in. I took great care in my selection and I decided to try Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (or El laberinto del fauno, “The Labyrinth of the Faun”). I knew I had made the right decision when I picked it up in the store and read the following statement near the bottom of the case: “On the same altar of high fantasy as The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.” Alas, I couldn’t resist my burning skepticism, and without looking any further, I made my way to a checkout line.

            Pan’s Labyrinth is set in 1944, in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and tells the story of Ofelia, a young girl grappling with two terrifying realities: (1) life with her ill, pregnant mother and despotic, military-captain stepfather and (2) the quest appointed to her by a faun she meets in a labyrinth in the backyard of the military base.

            The film opens with Ofelia lying on the ground, bloody and seemingly close to death. A narrator begins with the familiar “A long time ago in a faraway land” opening and tells a story about a lost princess from the Underground Realm, a place that appears to be geographically located beneath our primary world. She makes her way to the human world where the sun causes her to lose her memory, and she eventually dies. But her father, the king, believes that her soul will return one day, “perhaps in another body, in another place, at another time.” The film then turns to Ofelia reading a fairy tale while riding with her mother to their new home with the Captain. 

            This summarizes the first three minutes of the film, and we, the viewers, might have a few questions and expectations. First, we expect the film to be about the princess returning to the Underground Realm. Second, we probably expect Ofelia to be said princess. But as soon as the story shifts to Ofelia in the car, we begin to rethink. Is the entire story we were just told simply the story Ofelia was reading in her book of fairy tales? This question influences our “reading” of the next 109 minutes. Do we interpret the faun, fairies, labyrinth, Pale Man, giant frog, and Underground Realm as a psychological fantasy that Ofelia constructs to cope with the horror of the primary world, or do we believe that the secondary world is real?

            Between this opening and last few minutes of the film, it seems as though Ofelia’s interactions with the fantastic are real, as they no doubt are to her. But like the beginning of the film, the last few minutes bring everything into question again. (*Spoilers*) Vidal, the sadistic stepfather, has shot Ofelia, and Mercedes, the kind servant who is like a second mother to Ofelia, hums to her as she dies. As Ofelia lies there, a bright light appears and the shot cuts to a healthy, elegantly-dressed Ofelia standing in a gold-laden hall in the Underground Realm. Also there are her mother (apparently the queen) and her infant brother. Since we know that her mother died quite some time ago and her little brother is now in the care of Mercedes, we realize that this cannot be real. The film turns back to Ofelia lying on the ground; she smiles and then goes still. The narrator comes back to end the story with “happily ever after.” He says, “It is said that the princess returned to her father’s kingdom. That she reigned there with justice and a kind heart for many centuries. That she was loved by her people and that she left behind small traces of her time on earth, visible only to those who know where to look.” We finish with the end of the legend that was started in the beginning of the film. Ofelia filled in the gaps with her own fantasies.

            In the end, we don’t mind this fact because we applaud Ofelia for her ability to cope with a nearly unbearable reality in whatever way necessary. But the student of fantasy cannot stop there. We have to ask if this film is really fantasy. The secondary world is never confirmed to exist beyond Ofelia’s imagination. While this uncertainty may help the narrative in terms of its psychological elements, it altogether diminishes the credibility of the secondary world. The film is a perfect smorgasbord for psychoanalysis, and I admit that my first few attempts at this review veered strongly in that direction. But the fact that the distinction between fantasy, the literary genre, and fantasy, the psychological phenomenon, is so incredibly vague leads me to conclude that Pan’s Labyrinth is not fantasy, at least not as defined by Clute and Grant (see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy) and J.R.R. Tolkien (see “On Fairy-Stories”), and it is certainly not high fantasy. I would argue that it is a hybrid of fairy tale and horror (see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy). This is not in any way meant as an insult to the film. The story, the score, and the visual aspect of the film are brilliant and conducive to multiple re-readings and pages of analysis, and I look forward to such an opportunity. 
             Seeing as how this is my first experience with Pan's Labyrinth, I am curious to know the thoughts of those of you are familiar with it. It's such a hard film to define and categorize (which is one of the reasons I liked it so much), so what do you think?