Pan's Labyrinth

This is a mighty grim “Alice in Wonderland” tale, call it “Ofelia in Maliceland.” I feel a bit bullied in rating this film, since it comes with a Metacritic average of 98, fourth highest ever on the site. I went in looking for a reason to debunk the hype, and yet I couldn’t find a single one. I’m no fan of CGI-dependent filmmaking, but here it was so seamlessly interlaced with the “real” world of the film, together they made a mythos. As for Guillermo Del Toro, I was never tempted to see Hellboy or his other comic-book-based Hollywood films, and was not taken with his previous film about a child in Fascist Spain, The Devil’s Backbone, but with this he moves into must-see director company with his two amigos from Mexico, Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel). Here is the story of an 11-year old girl (Ivana Baquero in a wholly believable performance, on either side of the looking glass) who clings to her books of fairy tales, while thrust into a real world of legendary badness, when her widowed young mother weds an evil stepfather. No, I mean really, really evil. Sergi Lopez is Fascism made flesh, creepy but all too real. (His performance is enhanced by contrast of his roles in With a Friend Like Harry and An Affair of Love.) It’s 1944 and while the Allies may be liberating France, Franco is cementing himself in power in Spain, where the Fascists are relentlessly rooting out the last bit of Resistance in the hills. Maribel Verdu (well-remembered for Y Tu Mama Tambien) is housemaid to the commandant, but sister to the rebel leader, and she undertakes to protect the defenseless girl. But unbeknownst to all, Ofelia is a princess of the underworld in exile, who undertakes three missions assigned her by a huge fawn, in order to return to her idyllic home beneath the earth. Set design and music, makeup and computer animation, all conspire to weave a spell on the borderline between fairy tale and grim reality, interpenetrating states of being rendered with colliding force. Will definitely be worth another look, may well reach classic status. (2006, Images, n.) *9* (MC-98.)