Pan's Labyrinth

What a superb movie this was. Before going to see it I made a point of not watching any trailers or reading a single thing about it so everything that happened would be completely new. The opening titles set the stage of the film as a fantasy, but then you're sent right into the middle of Spain during the last years of the Civil War, and through the movie you're continually forced to move your mind between appreciating the fantastic creatures that make up one storyline and the human ugliness that intertwines with it through the film.

Despite it being aimed squarely at adults, this movie is every bit a true fairy tale fantasy, as if David Cronenberg were able to tell a fantastic tale with all his style but without mocking or desecrating the subject or the setting.

The twisting plot, where you can place your belief squarely in reality or enjoy the story as it's told to you reminded me a lot of Mulholland Dr., complete with elements that influence one world from the other, and the bigger mystery of the underlying psychological state of the main character. Lynch and Cronenberg teaming up would be unstoppable, but Guillermo del Toro beat them to it, apparently.

I'm going to find this when it comes out on DVD so I can watch it enough times that I don't need to read the subtitles and can just watch the story as it unfolds and try and wrap my head around the whole thing.

Labels: Movies, Pan's Labyrinth, Reviews