Pan’s Labyrinth
El laberinto del fauno
Guillermo del Toro (2006)
Spain, 1944. The Civil War ended five years previously but text on the screen explains that ‘Hidden in the mountains, armed men fight the new Fascist regime. Military posts are established to exterminate the Resistance’. Almost immediately, a voiceover starts to tell of a different once-upon-a-time. In the underworld, a realm ‘where there are no lies or pain’, the king’s daughter dreamed of daylight and blue skies. She escaped to the world above ground, where light blinded her and erased her memory. The princess became sick and died, but the king knew his daughter would eventually return to the underworld, in another body, at another time. Next, ten-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is travelling with her heavily pregnant mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), to Navarra, near the Spanish border with France, and a military outpost headed by the Falangist Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who is also Ofelia’s new stepfather. As their sedan car approaches its destination, the child has her nose in a book of fairytales; Carmen affectionately chides Ofelia, ‘You’re too old to be filling your head with such nonsense’. But Pan’s Labyrinth’s audience already knows better.
Even before telling the story of the princess, writer-director Guillermo del Toro has shown the distressing image of a young girl on the ground, her face fearful, blood streaming from her nose. The image is no less distressing for the accompaniment of a sweetly sung lullaby; it’s transformed when we realise that the blood is gradually retreating into the child’s nostril until all trace of it has disappeared. With the voiceover preparing to conclude the tale of the underworld princess, del Toro’s camera tours a landscape of ruins – bombed-out buildings, half-demolished walls with posters declaring the triumph of Francoism, empty shoes, broken spectacles. As we see the child reading her book, we recognise Ofelia as the stricken girl with the surreal nosebleed. Before she and her mother reach the military outpost, they make a brief stop because Carmen is feeling ill. While the soldiers escorting them to Navarra get water for her mother, Ofelia wanders off from the car towards a forest that runs alongside the road. She finds a piece of stone, on which the outline of a human eye is carved. Entering the decidedly mysterious forest (tangled tree roots, heavy mist), she comes upon a stone monolith topped by a grotesque face, mouth wide open, one eye missing. Ofelia puts the piece of stone she found into the gap in the statue’s face, where it fits neatly. A huge stick insect emerges from the gaping mouth and, morphing into a fairy, leads Ofelia into a stone labyrinth. The sound of Carmen’s voice, calling her daughter, scares away the stick insect/fairy guide and Ofelia rejoins her mother, to resume and complete their journey. These elements link the reality of 1940s Spain with fantastical worlds – a link on which Pan’s Labyrinth crucially depends throughout. For me, it’s sustained in mainly negative ways. I think the towering reputation of del Toro’s film is undeserved.
I saw Pan’s Labyrinth on its original release, but I hadn’t watched it again until now. My chief recollection from the first viewing – that Sergi López’s Vidal upstaged the phantasmagoria – was certainly confirmed this second time around, but López’s dominance epitomises what’s wrong with the film more largely. There’s a broad consensus that the Franco regime in Spain was an oppressive patriarchy so it’s fitting that del Toro substitutes a wicked stepfather for the wicked stepmother tradition in fairytales. In political and/or historical screen drama depicting a violent totalitarian or authoritarian regime, it’s conventional for a single brutal psychopath to represent the evils of the regime as a means of streamlining the narrative, and that’s the case in Pan’s Labyrinth. Although Vidal’s henchmen do commit acts of violence, they are, with the partial exception of Garcés (Manolo Solo), anonymous figures. López’s portrait of Vidal, on the other hand, is a brilliant fusion of symbolic power and persuasive human detail. He repeatedly has you thinking, if looks could kill – but those looks are achieved with remarkable economy. López radiates such menace that you’re apprehensive even when Vidal, with a cutthroat razor to hand, is shaving himself. The handsome captain is pathologically precise in his personal grooming and obsessed with the pocket watch he inherited from his father. Forever winding the watch and checking its inner workings, Vidal is immediately irritated by Carmen and Ofelia’s delayed arrival in Navarra. When Doctor Ferreiro (Álex Angulo) ventures the opinion that fragile Carmen shouldn’t have travelled at such an advanced stage of her pregnancy, Vidal, the ultimate patriarchalist, retorts that ‘A boy should be born wherever his father is.’ His arrogant assumption that the child will be a son proves to be correct.
But though the power of Sergi López’s performance consists largely in internalising his character’s viciousness, this isn’t always withheld. It first bursts out when Vidal murders two rabbit poachers, a father and son, under the mistaken impression that they’re Maquis rebels. He smashes the younger man’s face with a glass bottle, shoots dead the protesting father, shoots again to finish off the son. These moments of real sadistic violence eclipse del Toro’s fairy story, for all the ingenious and bizarre visual design of its setting. The story is well enough worked out. The lost princess’s father built many labyrinths – portals from the overworld to the underworld – to enable his daughter’s eventual journey home. The labyrinth to which Ofelia repeatedly returns is guarded by a scary-looking faun, easily roused to anger. (The faun has a body concealing Doug Jones, who would later incarnate the creature in del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), and is voiced by Pablo Adán, who also supplies the film’s opening voiceover.) The faun sets Ofelia three tasks, to be completed before the approaching full moon. To carry out the tasks, the girl must consult a book whose pages are blank until helpful pictures magically appear on them. All this beguiling stuff is lightweight, though, when juxtaposed with fascist savagery.
The Shape of Water is far from a great film, but del Toro does succeed there in interweaving the real and fantastic aspects of his story. In Pan’s Labyrinth, they play out virtually in parallel. They intersect only through Ofelia’s presence in them both and on the rare occasions that del Toro’s imagery in the phantasmagorical world symbolises reality. The first of Ofelia’s three tasks is to retrieve a golden key from the belly of a monstrously bloated toad, which dwells in the roots of a fig tree whose growth the squatter stifles: the twisted, uterus-shaped fig tree represents pregnant Carmen’s plight as well as the state of the nation. Ofelia feeds the toad magic stones that look just like the bugs that are its normal diet; the stones cause the toad to swell to an even greater size before it vomits the revolting mass and contents of its stomach, including the key. Otherwise, if the film’s two worlds sometimes seem to have equal weight, it’s only because the real-world half, despite shocking bits, is limited by workaday plotting. It’s obvious from the start that Carmen won’t survive giving birth to Vidal’s child, that mild-mannered Doctor Ferreiro and Vidal’s housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) are secret Maquis sympathisers. Mercedes’ brother Pedro (Roger Casamayor) is the guerrillas’ ringleader.) It’s obvious as soon as del Toro focuses on the kitchen knife that Mercedes secretes in her apron, that this will come in handy as a weapon: in due course, the knife does to Vidal’s face what that cutthroat razor has always threatened to do. And there’s plenty more in Pan’s Labyrinth that’s unsurprising – including most of the performances and Javier Navarrete’s eerie-uplifting music.
31 May 2026