The reviews are warm, and most are more than warm. Critics agree that del Toro has set a fairy tale down in the Spain of 1944 and made both halves darker for the contact. The praise clusters on the fantasy: the creature designs, the detail of the world beneath the labyrinth, the look of the film as a whole. Sergi López’s captain is singled out, and several critics note that the monsters below are there to echo the brutality above rather than to decorate it.
The reservations are about the join. The Guardian finds the political, overground half far less alive than the dreamscape beneath it, and misses any real narrative drive. Slant goes further, calling the split between reality and fantasy almost pathological and the characters thin. Time Out, writing years later, admires the design but finds the storytelling disjointed. The spread is moderate: nobody dislikes it, but the two mixed notices come from serious quarters and share the same complaint.