It’s 1955, and Ofelia and her ailing mom are sent to the post of Sergi López in Spain. López is her mom’s new husband and a sadistic army officer battling an uprising.
Ofelia discovers an ancient maze and as she explores it, she meets an extraordinary creature: the ancient faun, Pan. Pan tells her she’s a lost princess, can become a queen and can attain immortality. All she needs to do is carry out three very dangerous tasks.
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is a grown-up fairy tale that isn’t afraid to embrace the darkness that lurks in the best Grimm tales. Visually stunning, the best Prime Video movie mixes wild fantasy with the more gritty realities of wartime Spain; this is not a Disney kind of fantasy movie.
A labyrinth to lose yourself in
Empire gave Pan’s Labyrinth five stars. “Dark, twisted and beautiful, this entwines fairy-tale fantasy with war-movie horror to startling effect,” it said; while the movie “may deal with the stuff of children’s stories, it is a tale for grown-ups.” Consider that a warning: there are some scenes that even the hardened reviewer Kim Newman found “gruelling… more uncomfortable than the full-on slicing and battering in, say, Hostel“.
The Guardian wasn’t quite so excited, awarding three stars; “It’s so audacious and so technically accomplished, and arrives here garlanded with so many radiant superlatives, that I wish I liked it more. The film’s political dimension is never quite as lavishly or as enthusiastically achieved as its fantasy life,” Peter Bradshaw wrote: the real-world scenes feel “clogged” compared to the “sheer energy” of the subterranean world.
For the New York Times, which liked the film a lot more, “what distinguishes Pan’s Labyrinth, what makes it art, is that it balances its own magical thinking with the knowledge that not everyone lives happily ever after”. As reviewer AO Scott says: “Fairy tales (and scary movies) are designed to console as well as terrify.” Pan’s Labyrinth does both.