Pan’s Labyrinth

With modern-day growing fascism and the overreach of military powers, Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 horror-fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth feels especially prescient today. Set in 1944 against the backdrop of post–Civil War Spain, the film is a disturbing fairy tale for adults, exploring themes such as the oppression of women, the effects of war on children, the evils of dictatorship, and the importance of resistance.

Darker than Disney and rejected by Hollywood producers in the form del Toro envisioned, his enchanting fantasy unfolds like a twisted Brothers Grimm tale. Ofelia (played by 11-year-old Ivana Baquero) is a bookish, intelligent adolescent who enters an alternate world of magical spirit animals, escaping into her imagination to avoid the brutality and violence that envelop her.

The story begins with Ofelia and her recently widowed mother (Ariadna Gil) traveling to the forest home of her evil stepfather, a Franco-ite military captain (Sergi López). He functions as the film’s villain, his misogyny quickly becoming apparent in his attitude toward his new wife, whom he treats like a birthing vessel for his unborn child. His sadism continues to reveal itself under the guise of extreme nationalism, carried out with a bloodthirsty “cleansing” of a small group of rebels holding out in the surrounding forest.

One night, a shape-shifting fairy leads Ofelia to a crumbling stone maze, where she is informed by a talking faun named Pan (Doug Jones) that she is Princess Moanna, and her real father is the king of the underworld. To be reunited with him, she must complete a trio of treacherous tasks before the next full moon.

When Ofelia’s mother dies in childbirth, the captain’s only concern is protecting his newborn son, who will bear his family legacy. Meanwhile, Ofelia has been struggling with her three horrifying challenges, including retrieving a golden key from the belly of a giant toad, evading the Pale Man (also played by Doug Jones), a baby-eater with spindly eyeball-hands, and finally, offering the blood of an innocent to the king of the underworld. Ofelia’s final task is carried out only after she unsuccessfully tries to run away, aided by the beautiful Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), her one ally among the adults. She is the head of the household staff who has been secretly supporting the rebel fighters, and her bravery in the face of cruelty and her compassion for Ofelia offer the only light to the film’s dark ending.

Co-produced by his longtime collaborator Alfonso Cuarón, Pan’s Labyrinth has been described by del Toro as a “sister movie” to his 2001 supernatural political allegory The Devil’s Backbone, which is also set during the Spanish Civil War and confronts issues of brutality and innocence, offering an even deeper examination of the toll war takes on children. Despite the darkness of the underworld and the creepy monsters that inhabit it, it is the realities of everyday life—inhumane killings, amputations, losing a beloved parent to childbirth, the torture of war captives—that encapsulate the true horror of Pan’s Labyrinth.