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Critics Consensus: Pan's Labyrinth is Alice in Wonderland for grown-ups, with the horrors of both reality and fantasy blended together into an extraordinary, spellbinding fable.
Critic Consensus: Pan's Labyrinth is Alice in Wonderland for grown-ups, with the horrors of both reality and fantasy blended together into an extraordinary, spellbinding fable.
All Critics (229) | Top Critics (49) | Fresh (217) | Rotten (12) | DVD (21)
It's so audacious and so technically accomplished, and arrives here garlanded with so many radiant superlatives, that I wish I liked it more.
Guillermo del Toro has crafted a masterpiece, a terrifying, visually wondrous fairy tale for adults that blends fantasy and gloomy drama into one of the most magical films to come along in years.
This is a fantasy realm so fully and elegantly realized, it might be the adaptation of a classic novel. Yet the source is Del Toro's own capacious imagination.
Ofelia's smock is swiped from Alice, her faun from Narnia, and her magic book from Harry Potter, Del Toro sets her fairytale apart with its unrelenting gore and misery.
Pan's Labyrinth suggests that fairy-tale violence helps the vulnerable process and overcome real-life conflicts and that real-life violence permanently smashes the soul and the heart.
So breathtaking in its artistic ambition, so technically accomplished, so morally expansive, so fully realized that it defies the usual critical blather. See it, and celebrate that rare occasion when a director has the audacity to commit cinema.
Guillermo del Toro's brutal, breathtaking and magical finest hour is not kid-friendly.
Although Pan's Labyrinth ends in tragedy, it does so to show us that, regardless of what we are told, there are no happy endings in war.
This is a wildly creative film that plays on your heart and your head, stunning in its rich imagery and ambitious in its themes.
The film is one of those rare beasts, with a sense of genuine permanency. It beds down in your mind, like it is preparing to live there for a while. It is not pretty, but it is, sometimes, very beautiful.
...all the shivering intensity and satisfying denouement of the darkest Grimm's fairy tale.
Bewitchingly bonkers.
A very enjoyable film, that is well directed and has all round good production levels. It's almost like two films in one running side by side. It would have been a bit more interesting to see more of the fantasy characters and their world in which they live in. The film can be quite bloody and violent at times to which was a surprise, this is definitely for an adult audience.
Super Reviewer
Del Toro creates a magnificent fairy tale for grown-ups in which the innocence of fantasy collides with the horrors of war - and the result is a devastating, poignant and unforgettable film of lyrical beauty, with astonishing visuals, great performances and a wonderful score.
A little girl and her pregnant mother are relocated to an army camp to be with the unborn baby's father, an officious and sadistic captain in Franco's fascist military. Pan's Labyrinth is a gothic fantasy that sees a young girl escape into a world of fauns, fairys and political allegory to escape her cold, cruel, clockwatching, jack-booted step-father who is a kindred spirit of Schindler's List's Goethe. Once again Del Toro blends beautiful imagery with an affecting war story and the result is an enchanting experience that mirrors the fight between good and evil in both the real world and a young child's imagination in a way that reminded me a lot of the work of Hayao Miyazaki. Young Ivana Baquero puts in a performance that belies her tender years and the stunning visuals create a fantasy world that is beautiful yet conveys a suitably dark and disturbing undercurrent in Guillermo Del Toro's inimitable style. The two stories didn't quite gel together for me, feeling more like two separate stories told in parallel and so I must admit I prefer The Devil's backbone, but fans of Tim Burton and Jeunet will adore it.
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