Pan's Labyrinth
Seattle Sound film review

Where do fairy tales come from? Director Guillermo del Toro finds the seeds within the collision of imagination and tragedy in the mesmerizing Pan's Labyrinth. A lonely, bookish girl, thrown into the maelstrom of civil war, learns that she is the reincarnation of an immortal Princess of the Underworld when a visiting faun charges her with three magical tasks that must be completed before the next full moon. Meanwhile, her cruel Fascist stepfather leads his army to a blood-drenched confrontation with freedom fighters, and our heroine must maneuver between the two worlds of fantasy and reality. Del Toro paints Pan's Labyrinth as a dark fairy tale full of ash, mud and stone, as graphic in its horrors as it is wide-eyed in its innocence, a haunting yet hopeful fable with one of the most disturbing happy endings of recent memory. Fred Beldin, 11-2006