Terrific terror
Deborah Ross
Pan’s Labyrinth (15, selected cinemas) Just when I was beginning to despair of ever happening upon a visually ambitious movie willing to take on fascism, the Spanish Civil War, giant toads that spew their sticky insides out and a mandrake root that writhes and coos like a baby, along comes Pan’s Labyrinth. Well, I’ll be damned, I thought to myself. Fancy. It’s got everything, right down to the giant toad that spews its sticky insides out and the mandrake root that writhes and coos like a baby (although it only writhes and coos when bathed in fresh milk, I should add). But has the wait been worth it? Well, you’d hope so, wouldn’t you?
I should say, first, that fantasy isn’t really my genre. My limitation, I know, but there you are. I don’t mind The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe until they go into the wardrobe, then I just kind of lose interest. Lord of the Rings? I’d rather prise my own eyes out with a fork than sit through all that again, and why did they all have to talk so slowly? ‘You ... must ... find ... the ... ring.’ Honestly, if only they’d spoken at a normal pace we could all have been out in half the time. But, here, you not only get an extraordinary auteur’s inventiveness but, teamed as it is with quite shocking levels of violence, it’s also dark, original, boldly different and you know what? I think it’s good.
This is a Spanish film, written, directed and produced by Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Hellboy, Blade II, The Devil’s Backbone), who is, apparently, much admired for the kind of fantasy work that usually sends me running. (I only have to hear the words ‘Terry’ and ‘Gilliam’ and I’m running as fast as my short fat little legs will carry me.) But this is fantasy combined with historical narrative and, on the whole, it just works.
Here’s the deal: in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War a young girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), travels with her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), to move into the house of her new husband, Vidal (Sergi López), a Captain in Franco’s army. The Captain is a very wicked stepfather indeed. He is nasty, sadistic, and on a mission to destroy the guerrillas hiding in the surrounding forest. He is fascism run amok. He is also coldly indifferent to his new wife, just as he is to his stepdaughter, who eventually retreats to the labyrinth she finds next to the sprawling family house. Here she discovers Pan — an Arthur Rackham-esque creature: part horns, part foliage, all-sloping face — who tells her that she is the long-lost princess of this magical kingdom, and must perform three brave tests to regain her title. Is this for real? Or is this a world which Ofelia imagines to escape from the events around her; events that go from bleak to even bleaker?
We’re never told, and there is no real way of knowing, but I’d guess it’s her imagined world, just as children do retreat to imagined worlds. (My own was that I was adopted, if only so that I could one day slam my door against my parents and shout: ‘What do you care? You’re not my real mum and dad.’ When I eventually found my birth certificate proving they were my real mum and dad, I cried for days.) Anyway as, above ground, throats are cut and guerrillas are tortured and legs are amputated, underground there are toads and fairies and giant bugs and the Pale Man, a skeletal monstrosity with such hanging white skin he makes the tone in my upper arms actually look quite good. The animatronics are terrific — both beautiful and terrifying — and Ivana Baquero as Ofelia is wonderful: all dark eyes and moving innocence.
I’m not sure what this film wants to say — that the monsters we can imagine are never as bad as the ones we can be? — but it says it so inventively you don’t really mind. The human drama can, at times, be a little clichéd, with goodies who are very good and baddies who are very bad, but that kind of doesn’t matter either. This is not a kid’s film, by the way. Indeed, there is one scene where the housekeeper, Mercedes, cuts Vidal’s cheek open from inside his mouth that, at the press screening, even had the big boys from the broadsheets putting their hands over their eyes. They’re a lot nancier than you would think. It’s billed, in fact, as ‘an adult fairytale’, which may put you off but shouldn’t. You have no reason to trust me on this, just as you have no reason to trust me on anything, but you will see something original and daring and different. Go for it.
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