Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Latlight verdictApproved
- Year2006
- GenreHorror, Thriller
- DirectorGuillermo del Toro
- StarringIvana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones
Pan's Labyrinth 2006
My review
Pan's Labyrinth gets the Latlight seal of approval. Spain, 1944: young Ofelia moves with her pregnant mother to a lonely mill in the mountains, where her new stepfather, the cruel Captain Vidal, hunts the rebels hiding in the forest. Ofelia escapes into an old stone labyrinth, where a strange faun tells her she is a lost princess and gives her three dangerous tasks. Guillermo del Toro mixes a dark fairy tale with real war horror, and the scariest monster is not the Pale Man with eyes in his hands but the very human Vidal. Beautiful, cruel and moving, with an ending that stays with you.
Pan's Labyrinth: the real war in the mountains
The faun and the labyrinth are pure fairy tale, but the war around Ofelia is real. After Franco won the Spanish Civil War in 1939, thousands of Republicans fled into the mountains and fought on as guerrillas, the maquis. In October 1944, the year the film is set, several thousand of them crossed from France into the Val d'Aran in the Pyrenees, hoping to start an uprising; they were driven back within days. Franco's Civil Guard hunted the guerrillas and punished villagers who fed them, controlled food with ration cards and burned the farms that hid them. The last groups held out in the mountains until the early 1950s. Captain Vidal is invented, but officers like him, and the fear he spreads, are taken from that history.
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