Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth blurs line between fantasy and reality

Matthew Poland Guest Writer

The great achievement of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro’s phantasmic political fable, lies in its deep ambivalence about the nature of fantasy. Relating the attempts of 11-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to cope with the horrors of fascist Spain in the 1940s, the film plunges its heroine into a fantastical world of her own creation. But even as Ofelia’s world serves as her escape, it simulates reality in del Toro’s grim vision.

Set just after the Spanish Civil War, the film begins with Ofelia adjusting to a new life at the home of Vidal (Sergi López), a Francoist captain whom her pregnant mother has just married. An evil stepfather to the core, Vidal cares little about Ofelia and is only interested in her mother because she can provide him an heir to carry on his fascist legacy.

As the captain prepares for the birth of his son, Ofelia finds herself drawn to the manor’s rocky labyrinth, an imposing structure that, like the film, contorts itself in startling ways. After winding her way down a staircase at the maze’s center, the child encounters a capricious faun, who convinces her that she’s a lost princess, sundered from a magical underworld where she reigns. He assigns Ofelia a series of enchanted tasks to test her abilities—sneaking into a rotting tree, for example, in order to slay an overgrown frog. As the film progresses, del Toro fluidly intercuts Ofelia’s quest with the struggles around Vidal’s manor, where guerrillas hidden in the hills launch surprise attacks against the fascist captain.

It is the tension between Spain’s reality and Ofelia’s fantasy that lends the film transcendence. A realm that both runs parallel to and contrasts with the reality of post-War Spain, Ofelia’s netherworld enacts the horrors of reality even as she means to escape them. In one breathless sequence, the young girl must sneak past the sleeping Pale Man—an albinic monster who palms his detached eyeballs—in order to steal one of his treasures. Gazing around the monster’s lair, covered in crude illustrations depicting the beast’s taste for children, Ofelia comes across a pile of shoes. This image of discarded footwear—at once a logical summation of the Pale Man’s hunger and a chilling, metaphysical reminder of the Holocaust—becomes emblematic of a film where reality continually encroaches on fantasy. Throughout, Del Toro suggests the inescapability of the real, even in our fantasies, which can distort reality but cannot deny it.

This is not the first time del Toro has united the fantastical with the historical to address and confront fascism. His 2001 film, The Devil’s Backbone, combined gothic horror with political allegory to explore a boy’s experience of the Spanish Civil War. That film was impressive, but Pan’s Labyrinth is even better: bolder, gutsier, and more voluptuous than its predecessor. Like Cocteau and Lynch, whose styles inform but do not govern the film, del Toro has emerged as an oddity—a humanist with an eye for the grotesque. As he traces the horrors of fascist rule in both grounded and fantastical contexts, the director refuses to shirk the bloody details but always lends enormous sympathy to his characters, particularly Ofelia. Morbid though the film may be, it’s also one of the year’s most humane.