Pan's Labyrinth

I am going to be controversial and say this revered film is only so-so.

Yeah, I know, a real hot take on a film released 17 years ago.

This is Pan.  He has a labyrinth.

In a nutshell, for the three people who don't know nothin' about this film.  It is set in Spain during the Civil War.  A young girl, Ofelia, and her mother travel to a large house commandeered by fascist troops.  One of them their fascists - the commanding officer - is Ofelia's step-father and the father-to-be of the child Ofelia's mother is carrying.

Ofelia soon discovers there is a whole whacky world of fantastic beasts living in the ancient labyrinth behind the house (rumours Jack Nicholson can be seen in a photograph on the wall can not be confirmed at this time.)

One of these kooky characters is a faun who tells her to do a lot of stuff because she's actually a princess and if she does them she'll get her magic kingdom back.  So she does.  Meanwhile some plucky partisans are scrapping with the evil fascists.

We know this is a serious film with a serious point and not just a fairy tale because fascists.

The whole thing feels like a reworking of ideas borrowed from Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive. Spain?  Check.  Civil War era?  Check.  Fascists?  Check.  Little girl?  Check.   Secret fantasy life centred upon a monster?  Check.

While there is nothing wrong with tqaking inspiration from the past (and it is better to steal from the greats rather than the mediocre) it doesn't make make the film intrinsically interesting.

It's a very pretty film with lots of filters and stuff.

It is beautifully filmed and well acted, particularly by Ivana Baquero; but neither of the two story lines work on their own and they don't really gel.  The fantasy world is just a setting for a series of fetch quests in the style of Coraline. Go steal a toad from a key.  Go nick the Pale Man's dagger but don't eat any of his ... oh, you silly girl!

I SAID DON'T EAT ANYTHING.  WHAT BIT DID YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?

The guerilla story line is pretty routine stuff, the standards tropes we are familiar with from a dozen other films.  Just throwing those tired old ideas into a mixer with some weird fantasy stuff doesn't make them new or more interesting.

I would have preferred a story which focused more of the fantasy, with the 'real world' stuff very much in the background - as Ofelia would have experienced it. Ofelia should have been completely oblivious to the war going on around her, as she explores the Labyrinth and the magical world it offers her, in the manner of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures.

I'm literally a demon, but still not the worst thing in this film.  Not while there are fascists.

  

This would have been more intriguing for the audience as they try to work out what is real and what isn't, and what horrors Ofelia is trying to escape from.  Atrocities could have been presented in fantastical form as Ofelia struggles to cope with them, and her mother's own involvement with people who are objectively evil.

And this would have allowed the director the opportunity to perform a classic rug pulling when fantasy is peeled away to reveal horrid reality beneath.

But we did not get that film - a sentiment I find myself repeating very often - and instead we get a less interesting and fairly typical excursion into magical realism, a genre I have always regarded with some doubt.  Can 'magic' really help us understand the world around us and diagnose its problems?  Or are excursions into magical worlds always just that - fairy stories dressed up in adult clothes so grown ups can enjoy them without feeling embarrassed?  Does magic season the reality or mask its true flavour?

Sometimes grisly reality is allowed to intervene, but either too often or not frequently enough.

So, why does this bother me?  If Del Toro is happy making mediocre fantasy / horror films it is easy enough for me to ignore him.  There are more films I have not seen and will never see than there are films I have seen.  But Del Toro is not content to sit quietly in his box.  He has Jacksonesque ambitions to bring great works to the screen.  Specifically, he seems to be seeking to don the mantle recently shed by Stuart Gordon, as the great mis-adapter of HP Lovecraft.

This makes me worried for his eternally forthcoming At the Mountains of Madness.  Not only is it a very difficult story to see how it can be adapted - the source material is basically a couple of hundred pages of two guys looking at bas reliefs, with a shoggoth on top - but Del Toro's reputation as a master of horror and fantasy seems to be overblown.  He didn't get the story of Pan's Labyrinth so how will such a shallow director cope with the cosmic horror of Lovecraft?  The production tests that have been released seem point in him heading off in entirely the wrong direction, re-writing the story wholesale to add extra ick and graphic slitheriness.

The most effective part of Lovecraft's icy yarn was the discovery of the devastated camp and the horrible hints at what had happened there.  Del Toro seems to have opted to show us what occurred, rather than letting us play imaginatively with the ruins and the curious - sorry have to do it, because Lovecraft - unspeakable suggestions.

Perhaps the best outcome would be for the project to become lost forever,  like Peter Jackson's  Dambusters vanity project.  Let the mountains of madness remain frozen in the Antarctic ice.

Star Rating: **