The Colby Echo

Issue date: 2/9/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Don't let the marketing campaigns fool you. "Pan's Labyrinth" has been presented to Americans as a gothic fantasy in the vein of a surrealistic and creepy take on the "Alice in Wonderland" story. A girl on the brink of young womanhood named Ofelia follows a mantis-turned-fairy into a labyrinth, down a deep and dark staircase where she meets a faun who will introduce her to a dream world that may prove an escape from the horrors of the real world. Though the world that Ofelia discovers, like any fairy tale world, is full of whimsy and play, it is easy to forget that is a living nightmare as well.

What the trailers, commercials and posters fail to show potential viewers is that the film is mostly occupied with a war story, taking place in the WWII-era Spanish countryside. The fascist regime has just taken power and is attempting to quash the last stragglers of the Resistance. Ofelia's mother has married a high-ranking captain and she and Ofelia are forced to move to an encampment in a forest occupied by guerrilla fighters. War literally surrounds Ofelia, and the fantasy world she seeks out isn't outside of it: it's in the very same forest, and in her very own home. There's no rabbit hole or portal, no other dimension. The dream world occupies the same space as the real.

No more than fifteen minutes into the film, we bear witness to two innocent farmers' fatal beating with a wine bottle by Captain Vidal, Ofelia's stepfather. We see the blood and feel the blunt impact of the bottle on the bones of the victim's skull. Only minutes earlier we'd been introduced to fairies and the faun. It's a harsh juxtaposition but feels disturbingly natural. "Pan's Labyrinth" is as much about war and brutality as it is about fairies, fauns and golden keys; it is as horribly real as it is surreal and fantastical. Its magic is its ability to see these superficially disparate parts of the human experience as interchangeable in their fundamentals, reminding us that our dreams are the made of the same stuff as our nightmares.

Scary thoughts, to be sure. But the ideas embedded in the film wouldn't matter if director Guillermo del Toro didn't have the technique and imagination to make them believable. He paces the film like a descent into a world that gets more and more difficult to bear. Beatings beget shootings, amputations beget torture. The creatures Ofelia encounters go from disgusting and obscene to horrifying and disturbing. Most memorable is the "pale man," who looks less like a man and more like a hybrid between a de-feathered chicken and an emaciated circus freak. He has holes in his palms where he sticks in his eyeballs to see. When he awakens, his claws strike into a dinner table with a noise that sounds like a giant rock being slammed into a steel wall. It's details like these that make the film, both in its fantastic and realistic elements, all too believable. The "pale man" is terrible and mystifying, we want to look away from its monstrosity but are enchanted by the craft and vision that created him and brought him to life.

The film isn't all surreal spectacle and creepy hocus-pocus. There are giant toads and wormy things, evil men and evil monsters, but at its heart the film is a story about a girl learning that neither dreams nor reality offer solace from the chilling truth that life is full of misery and dread. In the end, Ofelia is alone, abandoned both by her dream of escape and by the few allies she's had in her life. She should be overwhelmed by what she's gone through, and the viewer should be too. Del Toro has relished in not turning his camera away from the things his viewers and Ofelia have wanted to see the least. So perhaps it's best that "Pan's Labyrinth" has been marketed as escapism, because the rude awakening Ofelia experiences is the same as the unknowing theatergoer's, and ultimately, the bravery Ofelia musters in the film's final moments is instilled in us as well.

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