I’d heard the hype surrounding Pan’s Labyrinth as it was an amazing story with incredible images, but it was clearly not a movie to take young kids to.
If I had to sum it up, I’d say that it was a very dark and brutally graphic version of Anne Frank goes to Narnia, but without a happy Hollywood ending. It dropped the F-word, had a person’s face get smashed in, repeatedly, with a wine bottle, bugs and goo abound, heads are shot at close range with pistols, a leg getting sawed off, a bloody pregnancy gone wrong, two torture scenes, a needle injection and widthdrawl is shown, and quite a bit of facial mutilation, only enhanced by someone stitching their own cheek back up, drinking a shot glass, and the bandaged wound fill with liquid. Relatively little was left to the imagination; so if you’re graphically squeamish, think twice – you may spend a lot of time turning away.
The whole movie was in Spanish with English subtitles. Once again, this worked for me, as about part way through the movie I found that I was picking up more Spanish than I knew and just absorbing the subtitles.
Like many foreign films, there’s a number of pieces that don’t make a lot of sense and are just given. It starts with a young princess escaping – she just does. She suffers consequences for it – she just does, let’s call it magic. A number of the characters spontaneously do things out of character, and yet, the movie is still amazingly predictable at any given point.
SPOILER ALERT
I wouldn’t rate the story as being anything amazing: Mother remarries jerk when current husband dies, daughter thrust into hellish home. Home has labyrinth, girl goes exploring, fawn reveals she’s a princess and to return needs to perform three seemingly random tasks. Things don’t go well, girl dies.
END SPOILER ALERT
Graphically, they did some pretty good stuff, especially with costumes and close-up special effects. However, I found the story depressing and left the theater feeling drained and unfulfilled.