This concludes our series of films by Mexican filmmakers. Guillermo del Toro, whose Shape of Water won the Best Picture Oscar, returns to the phantasmagorical cinema that defined such early fare as Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone with this haunting fantasy-drama set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and detailing the strange journeys of an imaginative young girl who may be the mythical princess of an underground kingdom. As her high-ranking stepfather remains determined to fulfill the orders of General Francisco Franco to crush a nearby guerrilla uprising, the young girl soon ventures into an elaborate stone labyrinth presided over by the mythical faun Pan.
“Pan’s Labyrinth is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it’s the other way around… The brilliance of “Pan’s Labyrinth” is that its current of imaginative energy runs both ways. If this is magic realism, it is also the work of a real magician.” — A.O. Scott, New York Times
“It’s not only one of the great fantasy pictures but one of the great end-of-childhood elegies.” — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com
“It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life.” — Anthony Lane, New Yorker
directed by
Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro
written by
Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro
with
Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones
Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones
language
Spanish
Spanish
country
Spain, Mexico, USA
Spain, Mexico, USA
production company
Picturehouse
Picturehouse