Word: ofelia
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...writer/director Guillermo del Toro combines elements of fairy tales with a harsh narrative set in Civil War-era Spain. Del Toro skews reality, beauty, and monstrosity, allowing normally pretty objects to become eerie and grotesque—but no less enchanting. In this hybrid world, a young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) encounters fairies disguised as giant stick bugs, a mysterious Faun (Doug Jones), something called the “Pale Man” (Doug Jones)—a child-eating monster with eye-sockets in his hands—and, most terrifying of all, a fascist, sadistic stepfather...
...terrific. It sets an Alice in Wonderland fantasy in the desperate conflict of fascists and insurgents in Franco's Spain, 1944. An Army officer, the brutal Capt. Vidal (Sergi López), has married and impregnated a young widow (Araidna Gil), bringing her and her 11-year-old daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to a house in the rebel zone he is patrolling. Ofelia, fiercely loyal to her mother and dead father, and rightly suspicious of the Captain, feels the force of strange creatures from the moment she arrives at her new home. While the adults career toward confrontation and tragedy...
...This sylvan realm is populated by stickbugs that morph into fairies, a toad the size of a Studebaker and, ruling them all, a seven-foot-tall Pan, the goat-god. He knows Ofelia as soon as she enters his underground home, identifying her as the long-lost Princess Moanna. He tells her she will reach her destiny - will "stroll through the seven circular gardens of your palace" - if she can accomplish three difficult tasks. One is to get a key that the toad has swallowed. The second: use that key to unlock a door in the lair of the Pale...
...much of the film, Ofelia's fairy-tale quest is secondary to the power vectors at work in the house. Tensions bubble between the Captain and Ofelia's weak mother, and especially the Captain and the housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verd?). These are two marvelous characters. She has a quiet ferocity to match her cunning, which makes her a splendid revolutionary heroine. He is the real monster of the story, with a sadism bred in him by his own soldier father, and a macho theatricality that makes him a great movie villain. López (who has played memorably creepy types...
...Most "adult" is Del Toro's belief that the world into which young minds soar or retreat is fragile indeed. The ending should not be revealed, except to say I've never encountered it in a children's book nor movie. While Ofelia burrows into Pan's labyrinth, the world outside - the real one - plays by a harsher, more violent, set of rules. Learning the difference is the beginning of maturity, the end of childhood innocence...