John Ellingsworth

Pan’s Labyrinth Ofelia is a brave girl. A carnivorous faun with unknowable motives has given her a book that predicts her future and sets her tasks to prove she is the King of the Underworld’s daughter, once lost, now reborn. The book tells her she must go to a withered fig tree and thrust three stones into the maw of the giant toad that lives beneath the plant and poison it, and no messing. She is straight down in the root-walled tunnels under that tree, crawling through slime and colonies of palm-size bugs in search of the toad. Meanwhile, above ground, some distance away, Ofelia’s heavily pregnant mother is preparing to join her new husband – the captain of an outpost of Fascist soldiers – at their remote encampment’s last pre-rationing dinner. It is the tail-end of the Second World War. An indigenous Allied counterforce is readying itself in the hills. Two stories, then, interleaved. As the Fascists take steps to stamp out the insurgents, Ofelia sees her future in the book and explores the ruins of an old labyrinth. There is violence to shock you; it seeps down into the fantasy. The faun gets less fey and more sinister, becoming angry with Ofelia for her failings. A subtle background tension – a level of threat – makes itself felt throughout, and erupts in a couple scenes, in which my heart was beating so hard it felt like it had migrated to my stomach. With the danger, there is beauty and calm and humour, and the safe seating of these diverse aspects is a sure sign of a creative vision fully realised. There are allegorical threads to untangle if you have the heart to, but at its centre the film is a human drama about kindness, integrity, exceptional courage, and virtue: the intangibles that stories were first made to convey. The entwined narratives are the fairy story and the world that makes such a story necessary, soul and body divided, and this is why the structure is so brilliant and, really, complex. Two stories interleaved, each made valuable by the other, each protecting what makes us human: imagination, fancy, dreams, love, an inner life. I have never seen a war film that has so successfully shown what the combatants are struggling for. I have never seen a fantasy so lethally important. I wept and wished I had a daughter. It is real if you want it to be.

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