"PAN’S LABYRINTH"

In 1954 in Spain, after the civil war, there was a remaining group of rebels that were still fighting in the mountains at the North from Navarra. It is the period that happened the whole story of the movie, it is about a girl and her mother that had moved to Spain where the girl would be waiting for her new stepfather, an fascist officer named Captain Vidal who wanted to exterminate the rebels group, and she found a mysterious labyrinth which takes her to a fantasy world.

The movie was directed by Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy) with Sergi López, Federico Luppi and Maribel Verdú in the cast. It won three Oscars.

The movie has really heavy scenes of violence and bleeding people, which show well the context that the girl, named Ofelia, had been introduced to. But Ofelia, since she was traveling to that region of Spain, found a large insect that she believed to be a fairy, it would be her guide to another reality, full of fantastic creatures. Firstly, she was guided by the insect, through a labyrinth in the mansion of her future stepfather, to a faun’s residence, the faun told her that she was their princess of the underworld, and the king has been waiting her return.

The faun assigns Ofelia three tasks to complete before the full moon to ensure that her "essence is intact", the first one is retrieving a key from the belly of a giant toad, the second is to take an ornate dagger from the lair of the Pale Man, and finally the third task was to spill her brother's blood to open the portal to the underworld. Someone could say “It’s the perfect plot for a kids movie, but made for older people”. In fact, that’s true, but that shows the girl trying to escape from the violent reality of men intended minds to an alternative world of fantasy where she could be the princess of the peacefull imaginary kingdom, that would come true, just after refusing to sacrifice her little brother and dying instead of him.

Myself… I liked the movie a lot, it made me think a lot after disregarding the heavy scenes on conversations with my friends, but it had also made me a little sad: the only one way that the girl found to reach the happiness was getting totally out from everything that humans had always been making together, “saving” her brother with it.
What could that death mean? During the whole time she could see creatures and things that anyone else could, as she was able to reach a world which only creatures with pure essence could live in, it would be true if the faun hadn’t considered her brother as pure.
So it could be a kind of society made of people (or any kind of creature) that has the same kind of thinking that they only could understand, representing the people needs of understanding or isolating.

But I think it is something more primitive, people beliefs, that came before any kind of thinking or comprehension, one of the essenses of the human acts.

But, in conclusion, what made me think so much was a question like “what would you die for?”. Therefore, I do recommend the movie.


Project from
André Barbosa
Higher 1
Teacher Fernanda M.

Centro Britânico
Perdizes Branch
São Paulo - Brazil