Pan’s Labyrinth

I watched this at Govinda’s in their upstairs lie-down cinema. Fantastically comfortable, but I was tense the whole time because the movie was so dark and gruesome. A fairy-tale in the original and oldest sense of the word, the audience is given a glimpse into the world of a girl whose spirit is the incarnation of a princess from another realm. In order to find her way back to that realm, she is required to complete three tasks that take her outside the world of her heavily pregnant mother, cold-hearted stepfather and the army base that he commands. Her stepfather is the villain of this movie – a strict military man with no human conscience who tortures and kills without blinking. His character gave the movie a menacing presence that had me flinching constantly at his brutality.

A darker but similar storyline to The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, the movie is visually incredible as the real world and the secret realm weave in and out of the story. The secret world is not softened or toned down in a nod to the childish presence in the film, but there’s real death, real terror and real pain. The dichotomy between the use of a young child as the female lead and the graphic brutality portrayed throughout the movie made it very unnerving. Although it was a bit too dark for my taste, it was still an interesting portrayal of a mythical, fantastical story.