How shall innocence respond to evil? How can the dominance of power be resisted or even defeated? Timeless questions del Torro explores in his stunning allegorical tale. But be warned, this is a dark, at times brutally explicit vision.

Historically human beings have responded to these fundamental questions in two ways: through myths and legends imbued with magical powers; and through the metaphysical narratives of religion. The magical conception is the more ancient. Indeed one might argue that the concept of the miracle is a relic of the magical within a religious perspective. The strength of Del Torro’s film is that he entwines these narrative threads in a tour de force of at times breathtaking imagery.

Ofelia, on the borders of sexuality and womanhood, accompanies her re-married, newly pregnant mother Carmen to the mountains of Spain where her husband Fascist Francoist Captain Vidal is fighting off residual guerrilla resistance in 1944 from Republicans refusing to accept defeat. Ofelia is an imaginative child much attracted through reading, to the magical realm and stories of fairies and fauns. When her tailor father died her mother married Vidal, a customer of the business.

The conflict between innocence and evil is paralleled in two overlapping narratives: the brutal war of attrition between the resistant Republicans and the victorious, Fascist Nationalists like Vidal, and Ofelia’s magical adventures initiated by her stumbling in the forest across a cricket that she takes to be a fairy. Despite her mother’s plea for her to treat Vidal as her father, it is clear that this sensitive, imaginative child is horrified by Vidal’s aggressive, brutal demeanour.

The real world narrative demonstrates not only Vidal’s absolute power over the local inhabitants, but his ruthless brutality in maintaining it. In the magical realm, Ofelia’s cricket transforms itself into an actual fairy and then leads her back into the forest. She meets with a faun who explains that she is the daughter of the king of the underworld and must undertake three tests in order to prove herself as a genuine daughter of an immortal, worthy to be a princess. These parallel narrative structures offer del Torro perfect opportunities for moral resonance. For example, just as Vidal follows his orders without question, however much brutality fulfilling them may require, so the faun requires Ofelia to meet without question, certain unexplained conditions in her quest. That Ofelia and Vidal respond differently to these absolute demands on their behaviour lies at the moral and spiritual heart of the film.

Ofelia’s mother is treated by a kindly Dr Ferriero and she herself befriended by Mercedes, servant to Vidal. Both are secretly helping the Republican dissidents, creating a constant palpable sense of dramatic tension throughout. Ofelia’s magical quests are accessed through a labyrinth and are superbly realised by del Torro with some startling, strong imagery at times reminiscent of Bunuel. In one sequence an unanimated figure sits before an untouched banquet. His eyeballs rest upon a plate before him. The faun has absolutely forbidden Ofelia to eat anything from the banquet, however tempting. Her task to recover a dagger from the room accomplished, as she leaves, she succumbs, despite the remonstrations of her protective fairies, to the temptation to eat one of the succulent grapes from the table, echoing Eve in the Garden of Eden. This act animates the figure and in a wonderfully Dali-esque sequence with the creature’s eyes placed in its hands not its eye sockets, Ofelia has to escape its terrifying pursuit. And adding moral resonance, two of her fairies sacrifice themselves to the creature to enable her to escape.

The final resolution of these dramatic threads is moving, poignant and elusive. Del Torro, thankfully is too much of an artist to succumb to a reductionist resolution to his latter day morality tale. He touches upon the deepest of our moral dilemmas and sets in counterpoint on one level the realist, irresistible triumph of the necessity of physical might, against the power of the imagination and the extraordinary, indeed irrational determination of human beings to sacrifice all for freedom and justice.

How shall innocence respond to evil? With imagination, love of freedom and justice and a determination to sacrifice all for them. That has been the history of the human spirit and is in the end what del Torro celebrates in this evocative, visually stunning example of cinematic art. Painful, exciting, terrifying, touching and uplifting at one and the same time. As profoundly real as it is genuinely magical, in the best sense of the word. Strong stuff – but not to missed.

I second your review, Zettel - if that's possible. As a concept this film shouldn't work, but it does. The brutal reality is offset by the unsweetened fairy-tale element.

I have to see this Thanks for the review!

Sarah

Mischa - glad you agree. Certainly very different from the usual run of the mill stuff churned out each week.

Sarah -you're welcome - hope you enjoy.

best for the New Year both

Z

A great movie and a great review.

JB

Thanks waxy.

Wasn't it great? So inventive and full of imaginative flair.

Glad you liked it.

Z

Zettel,

a review good enough to do justice to the film, and one it deserves. It was an utterly brilliant film. Moving, sad, honest, brutal, fantastic, consuming, beautiful, wonderful. I could go on.

Just one very picky thing... it's not a cricket - it's a stick insect. (I watched the special features on the DVD last night!).

A masterpiece.


Thanks for the great review.

Nik.

Thanks Nik

DVD special features eh? Now that's cheating! With Babel worth more than a technical Oscar.

Cheers

Z

Cheating I know. I'm sorry!

Well worth getting for the special features though - including an interview with dT at last year's Guardian Film Festival.

Cheers,

Nik.

I found it a powerful, upsetting and visually stunning film - but what I thought was most interesting was the ambiguity of the ending, and the way he refused to be absolute about Ofelia's imaginative life, and its 'reality' or otherwise. I saw the ending almost as a meaningless sacrifice - not wanting to give any plot spoilers away!
The Devil's Backbone by the same director is also very good - a supernatural Western, with the same beauty and mystical feel.

Leila - I agree about the ending. The film throughout asks the viewer to engage morally with either or both of the overlapping storylines. It seems to me absolutely fitting that it recognises the truth of moral issues - that they must in the final analysis be down to each of our own individual decisions. Therefore it seems to me the ending is powerful for reconising this even though of course it frustrates the Hollywood, tie-it-all-up-the-last-reel narrative imperatives. Hollywood would rather have you leave the cinema 'happy' than leave the cinema thinking Del Torro goes for the second and that seems to me absolutely the right choice.

Regards

Z

Yes yes YES!

The man is an absolute genius and that film may just be the best I've ever seen.

Nik.

I saw this last night and was completely drawn in. It's visually stunning, tense, and at times a deeply disturbing film of two worlds, only one of which - the Spanish Civil War - we know is based on any reality. The other magical world is the stuff of fable and fantasy. Both worlds exist side by side, and both have their share of monsters. Yet it is Capatain Vidal's brutality in the realist world which makes escaping to the magical one a welcome respite, not just for Ofelia, but for the viewer too.

This is an amazing film, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Davina

Glad you caught up with this one. DVD or did you manage to catch it in the cinema? Still pops up on the art house circuit.

Hope re-hab has cured you of the "orange coke and wotsits".

regards

Zettel

ha ha Zettle, you noticed my strange addiction to orange foods, not the good ones either. I mean who gets addicted to carrots??

Good to know P.L does the occasional round on the art house circuit. I caught the DVD, but it'd be worth seeing on a bigger screen for sure.

D.

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Zettel. Dunno who that Zettle is...