Pan’s Labyrinth (***3/4)

? Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director who’s alternated between dark Hollywood fare like Hellboy and Blade II and more individualistic Spanish-language movies such as The Devil’s Backbone, a mixture of social tragedy and fantasy set during the Spanish Civil War. This follow-up of sorts mixes similar elements. It is 1944. Even as the fascists are losing ground in the rest of Europe, dictator Francisco Franco is consolidating his power in Spain. An army captain (Sergi López) commands a small outpost that is trying to rid the area of a small band of rebels that stubbornly remains. Meanwhile, a girl (Ivana Baquero) unhappily arrives with her widowed mother, who has married (and become pregnant by) the captain. As the horror of her surroundings become apparent, the girl is led by a fairy to a strange world in which she learns she is the reincarnation of a princess.

+ Del Toro brilliantly sets a brutally realistic historical drama against a grotesque netherworld where a girl can become a heroine and control her own destiny. The historical part is fairly straightforward but suspenseful all the same, and López is a fine villain. The fantasy element is more appealing than the one in Devil’s Backbone. It’s weird and fun and gruesome and whimsical. Pan’s Labyrinth is like The Fountain if it hadn’t been incoherent and pretentious, or Lady in the Water if it hadn’t been dreadful. Del Toro visually contrasts the literal and the fantastic to great effect, and has a real find in the twelve-year-old Baquero.

- More literal-minded people might wonder why the netherworld creatures look the way they do, and I’m usually that sort of person, but mostly I just accepted it all.

= ***3/4 In a holiday season full of terrific movies, this one stands as among the best and most original, a modern Grimm fairy tale that takes you somewhere that only fiction can.

IMDb link