In a sentenceA children’s story with a 15 certificate, and the certificate is right
Spain, 1944. The Civil War is over and Franco has won, but fighters still hide in the northern woods. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is brought to an old mill with her mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil), pregnant and unwell. The mill is the garrison of Capitán Vidal (Sergi López), Carmen’s new husband, who wants his son born where he is and the partisans dead. On her first night a stick insect leads Ofelia into a stone labyrinth behind the mill, where a faun (Doug Jones) tells her she is the lost princess of an underground kingdom and must complete three tasks before the moon is full. The first sends her into a dying fig tree after a toad. Above ground, the housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) watches the captain.
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Guillermo del Toro puts a fairy tale inside the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and the two halves feed each other more often than they fight. The world above ground is thinner than the one below it. We recommend it warmly, and not to children.
Guillermo del Toro has made a fairy tale set in Spain in 1944, five years after the Civil War ended and the wrong side won. A girl finds a faun in a labyrinth; a captain hunts partisans in the woods above her. It is the most complete film del Toro has made, and we recommend it with two cautions: the mill is less alive than the labyrinth, and the certificate means what it says.
Capitán Vidal (Sergi López) has set up his garrison in an old mill, and his new wife Carmen (Ariadna Gil), pregnant and ill, is brought there with her daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero). López plays Vidal as a man who has arranged his life to leave no gap for feeling. He shaves with a straight razor and speaks to the people he is about to hurt in the voice he uses to order dinner. He questions a farmer and his son about a rabbit, and what he then does with a wine bottle made us look away. We do not look away often. Guillermo Navarro shoots the mill in blue-grey, rain on the stone, lamplight that never reaches the walls.
Below it, another palette. Eugenio Caballero’s labyrinth is a ring of mossed stone with a stair down its centre, and the places it leads to are amber and red. The Faun (Doug Jones) creaks when he moves, and has bark for skin and eyes set too wide to read. Javier Navarrete’s score is built on a lullaby that Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) hums without words, and it returns under both worlds until you stop knowing which it belongs to. Del Toro and his editor Bernat Vilaplana cross between them by sliding the camera behind a tree trunk or a pillar, so there is hardly a cut between the captain and the creatures.
One sequence we will describe only as far as its door. Ofelia draws a doorway in chalk and steps into a long dining hall, a table laid with fruit and meat, and at its head a thing with sagging skin, no eyes in its face and its hands folded on its plate. Paintings on the walls show what it eats. Nothing moves for a long time. We were frightened in the way a picture book frightens a child, by a thing that has not yet woken up, and we have not been frightened like that by a film since.
The weaknesses are all above ground. Carmen is a sickbed and a warning, and Gil is given little to play beyond pain and disappointment. The partisans in the hills, among them Mercedes’s brother Pedro (Roger Casamajor), are a cause rather than people. Some critics found the mill duller than the labyrinth and the join between them forced, and we half agree: the war scenes are made with less invention than the fantasy. But we think del Toro means the real world to look poorer than the story, and Vidal’s cruelty needs no design to land.
Verdú plays Mercedes as a woman who has worked out exactly how much she can risk and does not flinch when the sum changes. Baquero carries the film without the tricks child actors are taught: she listens, she is stubborn, and when told she is a princess she looks not delighted but unsure whether to believe it. Lala Huete puts her in a dark green dress with a white collar for the captain’s dinner, and she ruins it in the mud of the fig tree within the hour.
Set against del Toro’s films, this is where the pieces fit. Cronos (1993) had the creatures and The Devil’s Backbone (2001) had the war and the children; Hellboy (2004) had the budget and not much else. Here the monsters and the history need each other, and at 118 minutes there is no fat on it.
Watch it with the lights off and the sound up, and do not let anyone under fifteen talk you round, however much the trailer looks like a story for them. The last ten minutes moved us more than we expected, and we knew what was coming.
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.
Del Toro has delivered his masterpiece to date, a companion piece to The Devil's Backbone that entwines fairy-tale fantasy with war-movie horror to startling effect.
Read the full review →The critic praises del Toro’s engrossing fable that weaves a young girl's fantastical tasks with the brutal reality of Franco's Spain, highlighting the mesmerizing visuals and strong performances, especially Sergi López as the villainous captain.
Read the full review →A dark and majestic piece of fantasy that dissects the horror of fascism under the guise of a fairy-tale flick; it will likely stand as one of the year's best films.
Read the full review →The critic describes the film as an unusual, adult take on a familiar fairy-tale archetype, unsuitable for children due to its graphic violence and lessons about the limits of fantasy against repression. Del Toro excels as a filmmaker with grotesque, detailed fantasy designs and cinematic references, though the story form and execution feel somewhat disjointed.
Read the full review →The review notes the film's clean split between reality and fantasy as almost pathological, criticizing insufficient dramatization of relationships and cardboard characters, but praises the wondrous fantasy sequences and spiritual center.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film's political dimension less successful than its fantasy elements, with asymmetric energies between the historical surface world and the energetic subterranean dreamscape. He praises the extraordinary monster designs and visual images but notes a lack of overall narrative drive.
Read the full review →
The Devil's Backbone · not reviewed yetDel Toro’s earlier Civil War ghost story; the same war, the same care, fewer creatures.
The Spirit of the BeehiveA child in Franco’s Spain meets a monster of her own; quieter, and just as sad.
Tigers Are Not Afraid · not reviewed yetMexican children orphaned by the cartels, with ghosts and wishes; del Toro’s method, sharper teeth.
Spirited AwayA girl bargains her way through a spirit world where every meal has a price.
The Night of the HunterTwo children flee a preacher with a knife; a fairy tale told by moonlight.
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