My 2006 top-ten ranking: 10.
Risk of spoilers: definite.
As Jim Emerson pointed out, this movie is about putting adults in the same mind space that they were as children listening to fairy tales. Is that what Terry Gilliam was trying with Brother’s Grimm? If it is, then Guillermo del Toro has shown him the proper way, and it has to do with putting myth — which typically does not scare adults — up against reality, which typically does scare adults.
It’s a movie about fascism. About absoulteness. About the idea that there is one true path held up against the idea that the paths are what we create. Pan, after all, wants Ofelia to follow one true path. She does for most of the movie, until she confronts choice and desire. In one case she learns about consequence. In another, she learns about sacrifice.
Both of which Capitán Vidal, played with greasy sinisterness by Sergi López, know about. Although the latter he disregards. After he kills the doctor for crossing him, he says “You could have obeyed me!” The doctor replies “But captain, obey for obey’s sake…without questioning…. That’s something only people like you do.” The name of the character is Capitán Vidal, sans first name. His rank is his name. It’s where he begins.
So the movie gives us a child’s escape — or mystical experience — in a time and place where there is absolutely no escaping. It’s about the old world on the cusp of modernism, and the people who faced that cusp looking forwards, and the people who faced it looking backwards.
The Pan of this movie is not a playful, sexual nymph, he is a large and disconcerting force. He towers over the small Ofelia, who may — like Shakespeare’s Ophelia — represent the sane mind going mad. A bug becomes a fairy, a terrifying goat nymph becomes a delight. A delight that moves like an insect, and seems aligned more with the darkness in the world.
Maribel Verdú plays the true mother figure, since Ofelia’s mother is sick — metaphorically from the implication or idea that the Capitán killed her husband to have her, and physically from the child of that murder she carries. Verdú is the voice of reason in the chorus of madness — keep quick, she says, and steal your chance when it arrives.
What sells this movie are the sounds — the creaking house, the clicking insect-fairy, the lumbering eyeless beast. Gunshots and rain fall, chalk on stone, squelching mud and poured water.
The end of this movie is about birthing the future. It’s the choice to live in the tumult of the past, which some fear losing, and the choice to live in the hope of the future, which some fear gaining. It’s about choosing what to obey and what to let die.
Where we saw it: Movie Theater | We deign to rate it: 89 outta 100