Pan’s Labyrinth

The bright haired bride and I made a trip to Landmark Hillcrest cinema (local place that shows independent movies) to finally watch Pan’s Labyrinth. The regular movie theatres have dropped the ball on this one by not showing the movie. We were lucky to just find seats next to each other, there was a line going around the block.

So we settled into our seats seconds before the movie started and fell into the 1940’s Spanish civil war, a period of history I had little idea about. The story main character is Ofelia, a young lover of fairytales whose mother remarries Captain Vidal and they are both summoned out to a military outpost where he’s charged with putting down the rebellion in his area. On the way out to the outpost, her heavily pregnant mother asks the convoy to stop because she’s getting motion sick and Ofelia steps out and finds a rock in the middle of the road and turns it over to find it’s an eye of a statue and by seeming instinct walks to the side of a road and puts the eye back in the hole of a hidden statue.

Suddenly the movie takes on a surreal fairytale undertone that underlines the stark real life of living in the midst of a civil war. The plot is tightly drawn in both the war story and the fairytale side, it doesn’t over reach itself yet it does shock you, some parts had my wife cowering against my arm.

This isn’t your kid’s fantasy, that is if you don’t want them to go to bed with nightmares. It’s stark and new and compared to the fantasies I’ve seen over the past couple of years, this fantasy will brush away all of the cobwebs that one gets from gathering all of the plot holes in your head that you get from watching most of the fantasies that have came out over the past few years (except for the Lord of the Rings, that doesn’t count).

Hopefully it comes to your town soon.