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Pan’s Labyrinth is a great, modern fairy tale that weaves classic styles with modern sensibilities. It manages to create a story that shows real life horrors alongside imaginative, mythical horrors. One of the best scenes in the movie is when Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) must break into the lair of a hideous creature called, “The Pale Man” and retrieve and item from a lock box within. There is an enormous feast laid out at a table with the Pale Man, a subterranean beast with no eyes, seated at the head of the table. He remains dormant until aroused by the presence of the girl and then fits his eyeballs, with werewolf-like red pupils, into the palms of his hands and creates grave danger for the adolescent heroine. This scene is only one of many that teases the audience with a scary, but intensely organic fantasy world before quickly dropping the viewer back in the middle of the Ofelia’s scary reality.

Pan’s is the story of Ofelia, an 11-year-old girl who is forced to live at a Franco fascist outpost in Spain shortly after the Spanish Civil War. She is transported from her old home in the city to an old mill in the hills with her mother and new Stepfather, the gruesome Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez). While she is faced with the everyday reality of fascism, freedom fighters struggle to regain power in the hills surrounding her new home. Shortly after her arrival at the mill she is contacted by a shape-shifting fairy and led into the labyrinth and then into her underground kingdom. There she meets her guide back to royalty, the faun, Pan (Doug Jones). Pan is a mixture between mythical faun and Treebeard from the Lord of the Rings, who Ofelia describes as “smelling like earth”. All of the creatures in the movie are very organic and, although fantasy based, seem like they could have existed on earth if evolution had taken a different turn here or there. Pan gives Ofelia three tasks that she must complete in order to prove that her soul has not been corrupted by the mortal world and that she is fit to come back to her throne. Unfortunately, while performing these horrifying and fantastical tasks (one of which is the pale man), her life and her family fall into despair. All that is left for Ofelia is her kingdom, but her ability to reach it appears to be in doubt.

This movie is a labyrinth in itself, constantly twisting between fantasy and reality. It flips between scenes of intense, real brutality and scenes of vivid imagination and amazing creatures. Throughout this maze, Guillermo del Toro is able to converge the two in order to create a narrative that remains cohesive yet blurs the lines of fantasy and reality. By the end of the movie, life and death themselves are blended to the point where their own reality is questionable.

Grade: A-