My general exposure to the work of director Guillermo del Toro prior to seeing Pan’s Labyrinth was probably the first Hellboy film, and that one has always been a weird favorite of mine. Not enough to make any of my top ten lists or anything, but it’s a fun, weird little film that is right in del Toro’s general wheelhouse. Del Toro’s unique aesthetic is what tends to make his work so enjoyable. He seems to specialize in, for lack of a better term, grotesque beauty. Many of his better and more memorable films tend to have characters that are simultaneously beautiful and ugly at the same time, both thematically and in their general appearance. If anything, del Toro’s most normal-looking film was 2021’s mildly disappointing Nightmare Alley. I was expecting there to be more supernatural shenanigans for that one or something.
Regardless, I think I fell in love with del Toro’s overall work with his Spanish language fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth.
As I see it, most of the commentary I want to make about del Toro’s work here, as well as in his version of Pinocchio and The Devil’s Backbone, seems to suggest that as scary as ghosts, fauns, and a living wooden puppet that doesn’t understand death right away might be to children, the real dangers come from real world fascism. Del Toro’s clearly not a fan as all three of those films posit the fascists as the real villains. Granted, they operate more in the background for Pinocchio and The Devil’s Backbone. For Pan’s Labyrinth, they’re right out there, front and center in the form of young Ofelia’s (Ivana Banquero) new stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López) a truly malevolent excuse for a human being who seems to want to run everything in life according to his pocketwatch. And given how much fascists supposedly get the trains to run on time, I think that says everything there is to say about a man who always seems to be wearing his military uniform.
By the by, I have no idea how common a name like “Ofelia” was in 1940s Spain, but given character from Hamlet, that might be a good clue how doomed the character is before the film even gets too far, but that might also be me making assumptions about how much Spanish language speakers know about Shakespeare’s work. The Bard of Avon is considered the greatest writer in the English language, but that doesn’t mean he’s as universally known and acknowledged for people who speak other languages. The point being, Ofelia here might be related to Hamlet‘s Ophelia, or she might not, but it works better for my personal interpretation if she does.
To that end, Ofelia is on her way to a remote house in the forest where Vidal is hunting for republican rebels, dreaming for his pregnant wife, Ofelia’s mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil), to give birth to their son, and timing everyone on his stopwatch. But Ofelia is a big believer in fairy tales, and she’s convinced first that a stick insect is a fairy, and then later that a faun (American Doug Jones in the costume, narrator Pablo Adán as the voice) arrives to tell Ofelia that she is a lost princess from the underworld, and she has to succeed in some tests in order to prove that and return to her immortal life and royal title.
Now, it’s been noted that the film plays a bit about whether or not the fairies and faun are real or just a product of Ofelia’s imagination that she goes to when she wants to escape her brutal stepfather. The film could arguably play it both ways as the only time anyone seems to come close to seeing Ofelia interact with the Faun is when Vidal spots her at the film’s end talking to thin air. I am fairly sure del Toro himself is on-record for saying the fairies are imaginary, but there’s a part of me that would like to think otherwise. Why can’t Vidal see them? Perhaps because he’s an adult, and adults can’t see such thing. Perhaps because he’s evil, and he most certainly is. Or perhaps he just can’t because he’s not a displaced fairy like Ofelia is. Regardless, the film offers two conclusions when all is said and done: either Ofelia dies from a gunshot wound from Vidal while imagining herself returning to the fairy underworld as their princess, or she’s actually going there when her spirit leaves her body. Considering the film opens with Ofelia’s bleeding out in reverse, it isn’t a surprise that she’s shot at the end of the film. The only option for the audience is to wonder where she went afterwards.
In a way, it’s unimportant. The film is clearly contrasting the fairy tale world with the real one, and for all that the Faun’s tasks seem to be bizarre, they also clearly have rules that need to be followed. To get a key out of the giant toad’s stomach, Ofelia has to follow certain procedures. To get past the memorable Pale Man (Jones again, and this character is so memorable that he made up the majority of the pictures I found when I did a Google Images search for this film), Ofelia has to follow certain rules, and when she disobeys them, no doubt because of Chekov’s Gun, she has to flee and barely escape with only one of her three fairy escorts. Fairy tales have rules. They are not, in their original forms, some sort of gentle, sanitized things. Check out any of the original Grimm Fairy Tales that were later adapted by Disney to animation. They’re often violent and cruel to characters who deserve it. Del Toro is merely sticking close to the original intent of the fairy tale.
But as bizarre and strange as the fairy world is, it’s more colorful than the real world, and at least it makes sense by its own rules and logic. The mundane world of Vidal is ruled by his arbitrary rules, and even he suffers for it. After trying to force a stuttering rebel to simply count to three without stuttering, promising to let the man go if he does, he ends up horribly torturing the man until the compound’s doctor performs a mercy killing of the man, Vidal then shoots and kills the doctor. Of course, Carmen’s pregnancy isn’t going well, and she herself will die soon after, a fact that might not have happened had Vidal not shot the doctor. And for all that the Faun, that giant toad, and the Pale Man are ugly and monstrous things, the handsome Vidal is easily far more evil than the lot of them. Even the gross and cannibalistic Pale Man comes across as more clumsy than anything else as it lurches around. If a child like Ofelia can escape him once she puts some real effort into it, and he can’t follow her to the mundane world, he’s maybe not much of a threat in the grand scheme of things. Vidal can and will shoot a child for disobeying him. The key to surviving Vidal is to follow his rules. Unfortunately, when he’s in a torturing mood, he may be making those rules up as he goes along.
He certainly doesn’t know how to handle children. Ofelia’s actions, if based on imaginary concepts, are basically harmless. Did keeping the mandrake root under her sick mother’s bed really hurt anyone? Whether it was coincidence or was actually doing something when Carmen tossed the root in the fire before suffering a series of hemorrhaging attacks that ultimately cost her her life, it wasn’t as if the root was making her worse. Then again, Vidal likes to control things, as seen from when Carmen and Ofelia finally arrive at the house and Vidal insists the pregnant Carmen, a woman who was getting around just fine, confine herself to a wheelchair. But he is a fascist. They tend to value things like strength, physical and mental, as well as a harsh form of masculinity. I’m not sure what’s worse for him as a punishment: that he is finally defeated by a woman, his own maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) or when he’s told by Mercedes that she and the other rebels are never going to tell his infant son anything about him. And it is so in-character that he starts issuing orders to the people about to execute him about what he wants them to tell the baby boy someday.
So, Ofelia bleeds out, perhaps going in spirit to resume her throne as a fairy princess, Vidal dies forgotten, and the rebels go off to continue what is probably a fruitless fight against Franco’s government. And yet, somehow, the film has a feeling that is both hopeless and optimistic. Ofelia may be dead, or she may be a fairy princess. The rebels are still alive and able to keep up their work. Vidal, the real monster, one made moreso when his mouth is sliced open by Mercedes during an escape, is dead. A vanquished monster is still vanquished. But that’s a fairy tale in and of itself. Taking out one monster doesn’t really fix the world. And if there’s an enemy to children in a del Toro film, there’s a good chance it’s a very mundane, and often fascist, form of evil.
NEXT: There was a point when del Toro apparently toyed with the idea of making a sequel to Pan Labyrinth before he decided to go off and do something else instead. But up next is a master filmmaker who did decide to make a sequel to what was probably his masterpiece in the form of the equally masterful sequel, 1974’s The Godfather Part II.
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