A friend of ours (RW) had repeatedly recommended that we watch Pan’s Labyrinth, since it was one of the best movies he had ever watched. So it was on my list, and when our family was looking for a good movie to watch on the evening of Thanksgiving day, we decided to try it. That was after almost an hour of browsing various good movies and watching trailers, only to reject one after the other. Pan’s Labyrinth is also on a list of the “125 best movies of all time you have to watch before you die”, so how can we go wrong?
Guillermo del Toro’s film El Laberinto del Fauno is a Spanish film in the Spanish language, with English subtitles. We did not expect that we’d be “reading the movie” when we chose to watch it on the evening of Thanksgiving.
In Spain in 1944, fascism under Franco is in full swing. Military all over the country is brutalizing the population. Resistance warriors fight back as much as they can, waiting for the war to end. The captain of the local military force is an exceedingly brutal man. He married a woman with a young daughter, Ofelia. The woman is pregnant, expecting the captain’s baby. Ofelia does not accept her stepfather. She lives in a fairytale world, full of magical creatures like giant bugs, fairies, an old faun, and many other “monsters.”
While the story unfolds of how the resistance fighters try to undermine the regime with the help of the general population, and how the military thugs use sheer sadistic brutality against their own people, Ofelia tries to get out of her impossible situation by the magic of the fairy tale world that only exists in her mind.
Pan is a Greek god which the Christians later borrowed to embody evil, like Satan. He had horns, goat legs, fur, hooves, and a grotesque overall appearance. Such is the faun that appears to Ofelia and leads her through a set of impossible tasks to accomplish her own return to the throne of her true royal father and to live her life as the princess that she really is.
Pan’s Labyrinth brings a little-known aspect of World War II to life, namely what went on in Spain under Franco, while Hitler and Mussolini did their own murderous and ruinous deeds. Is Pan’s Labyrinth a great movie you have to watch?
No.
Does it, in my opinion, belong on any list of great movies you have to watch?
No.
There is not a spark of happiness, the good guys don’t win and gloom lives on. Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark and mystical tragedy that, after watching it, left me numb.
