Film Review: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Spoiler alert: This review gives away major plot details—including, especially, the end of the movie—that some may wish not to know before seeing the film. If this describes you, bookmark this page and come back after you have seen the movie. Otherwise, keep reading!

The tagline of last year’s “fantastic”—in more ways than one—film, Pan’s Labyrinth, is: “Innocence Has A Power Evil Cannot Imagine.” And this is quite apposite.

Guillermo del Toro, the director of Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno or The Labyrinth of the Faun), is deeply interested in the themes of innocence, power, and responsibility. His comic-book adaptation, Hellboy, is about a demon who is brought to earth by Nazis but ends up turning against his hellish origins and fighting against evil. His otherworldly powers become the occasion for the victory of good over evil. Moreover, Hellboy chooses to take on human form out of love for humanity in his heart. Rather than an incarnation of evil, Hellboy is an incarnation of good. In a way, Pan’s Labyrinth must be understood in relation to this prior artistic project.[Fn1] However different the two films are, both are deeply concerned with the relation between innocence and guilt, good and evil. While both films are, in the broadest sense, mythical adaptations of the cosmic conflict between Good and Evil—and thus stand in a long line of artistic renditions of this primal story—Pan’s Labyrinth stands apart as a specifically Christological retelling of this salvific mission.[Fn2]

Pan’s Labyrinth is set in Spain in 1944, right after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, and at the height of Fascist repression of resistance forces. A young girl, Ofelia, comes with her pregnant mother to live with her mother’s new husband, Captain Vidal, the leader of the Fascist forces. The ruthless Captain is stationed in a remote area in northern Spain where the last vestiges of the resistance remain. The area is lush and verdant, but for the imaginative Ofelia, it is also ancient, magical, and full of foreboding mystery. From the moment she arrives, she encounters a harsh world of sickness, deception, and death in which the Captain reigns as the violent lord of evil. There, in the midst of hell, Ofelia discovers a second world—one in which she is a princess, in which she has a unique origin, and in which she has a mission to accomplish. I say “discover” quite deliberately. The second world is not a creation of her imagination; it is a world into which she stumbles as an innocent, wide-eyed little girl.

The film deftly transitions between narratives: the story of her mother’s troubled pregnancy, the story of the Captain’s attempt to rout the resistance forces, the story of those who work for the Captain but remain loyal to the resistance, and finally—woven throughout these stories—the magical narrative of Ofelia’s mission to establish her identity as Princess Morana. The last of these narratives begins when Ofelia stumbles into a labyrinth behind the home of the Captain. At the end of the maze, she meets a mysterious faun who tells her that she is a princess—or, at least, that is her proper identity. Her immortal regality remains, however, a potentiality that requires actualization—or, more properly, confirmation—through the accomplishment of three tasks. To this end, the faun gives Ofelia a magical book to guide her on our journey. And with this cryptic introduction, the adventure begins.

The particulars of each task are finally not all that significant. Each task sets up the next, culminating in the final, climactic end. Moreover, each task becomes more and more dangerous, paralleling the growing menace in the “real world” (the “scare-quotes” are quite deliberate). As the Captain continues to expand his inhuman reign of evil, and as the resistance fighters grow stronger and more confident, the ominous events in human “reality” compel Ofelia to pursue a deeper Reality—full of its own evils, yet with a telos in mind.

We would greatly misunderstand this story, however, if we were to impose an artificial dichotomy between the “historical-real” world and the “magical-fantastic” world, between an objective world and a subjective world.[Fn3] Pan’s Labyrinth is entirely unlike Finding Neverland in this regard. Ofelia’s adventures are not at all comparable to the daydreams of J. M. Barrie. Her tasks have ramifications for the historical world. The world of the faun is not simply a concoction of her young, imaginative mind. Pan’s Labyrinth presents no real-unreal dualism; rather, the distinction is between real and Real. The “second world” is the Real world. As one reviewer aptly states, Pan’s Labyrinth is “realer than reality itself.” According to del Toro in an interview with Terry Gross, “what [Ofelia] sees is a fully blown reality. … I believe her tale not to be just a reflection from the world around her, but to me she really turns into the princess.”

In an important sense, therefore, the film is a criticism of the finality that we associate with our reality. Part of this critique involves the all important insight—which del Toro stated in the aforementioned interview—that all reality is, in a very real sense, imagined:

The entire world we live in is fabricated: Republican/Democrat, left/right, morning/night, geography and borders—all these things are conceits. Borders are not visible from a satellite picture. The fact that you can have a civil war where two sides kill each other, and essentially from afar they look exactly the same. They are both the same human beings; they share the same taste for food; they sing the same songs. This imagined conceit can create such horrors.

According to del Toro, our entire existence is compassed with imaginary constructs: national borders, political divisions, economic trade, time, traffic, etc. Of course, as we act on our imagination, these things take shape in the world. The tangibility of reality, however, does not negate the imagined character of so much of our lives. In other words, what we experience objectively with our senses is not, by definition, unimagined, and conversely what we imagine is not, by definition, simply a subjective idea in our heads. The very structures of our everyday existence require a kind of imagination. The genre of fantasy, especially in the case of Pan’s Labyrinth, exposes the artifice of our everyday lives through the unfolding of what del Toro calls “spiritual reality,” which is not opposed to our embodied reality but rather transcends it. Del Toro’s thought on this matter bears a close affinity to the theological work of William Cavanaugh, who opens his book on Theopolitical Imagination by stating: “Politics is a practice of the imagination.” Cavanaugh stresses many of the same points about the imagined nature of national borders and our notions of space and time. But he, too, wishes to posit a spiritual reality—in this case, the reality of the Eucharist which “overcomes the dichotomy of universal and local.” The Eucharist, like Pan’s Reality, transcends the finite divisions and imagined conceits that define our imagined human existence.

As a “spiritual reality,” fantasy is also a critical reality—a Reality that critiques reality. In the same interview, del Toro said that there are two kinds of fairytales and two kinds of horror films: those that are in favor of the present world—“the Establishment,” as del Toro calls it—and those that are against it.[Fn4] One kind uncritically affirms our present reality; the other kind, the better kind according to del Toro, criticizes it with “a beautiful anarchy.” Along with his other films, Pan’s Labyrinth falls in the latter category. His films, del Toro said, are attempts at grappling with the brokenness of our world. Rather than romanticizing our existence, del Toro admitted that he prefers subversive art which stands radically apart from the world as we see it by means of “a destructive, iconoclastic, liberating sense of anarchy.” Liberation, rather than uncritical affirmation, governs the way his films interact with human existence. In a lesser way, this is true of Finding Neverland as well—in fact, of any story which presents the common impulse to escape the confines of our fallen human existence. Pan’s Labyrinth, however, does not rest content with mere critique. Beyond anarchy, del Toro’s films offer an even more radical alternative. Pan’s Labyrinth stands apart from critical-escapist narratives by positing a constructive alternative, in which reality is not only condemned but overcome by true Reality. We might classify Pan’s Labyrinth thus as a critically realistic fable of redemption[Fn5]—one which takes its basic contours from the biblical narrative of Christ’s mission of redemption.

While Pan’s Labyrinth is no allegory, it is nevertheless a creative retelling of the Christian narrative. Such an interpretation may seem at first glance an unfaithful reading of the film, but del Toro already demonstrated in Hellboy that he has an interest in biblical themes. Moreover, del Toro grew up as a Catholic and has carried with him the religious sensibilities inculcated in his youth. Here, in Pan’s Labyrinth, he adapts a more specifically Christian framework for the purposes of telling the story of Ofelia. In order to appreciate the story properly, we must be careful not to read more into the film than we are given; at the same time, we must also recognize the multiple levels on which del Toro is working, which often lead to surprising discoveries.

The film begins by setting up the mythical narrative within which Ofelia lives. The narrator tells of a princess who incarnates herself as a young girl in order to complete a particular mission; if it is left incomplete, then the princess will return at another time and another place. (For this reason, the historical setting of the film is finally unimportant; del Toro happens to have a special interest in the period encompassed by the Spanish Civil War and WWII due to his conviction that this is a period of our history neglected to our shame.) In Pan’s Reality, therefore, Ofelia is the incarnation of this princess who descends from her transcendent origin to enter the hellish reality of Fascist Spain for the purpose of fulfilling a regal mission. The nature of this commission is unclear until the final moments of the film, in which reality gives way to Reality. Ofelia’s three tasks lead her to a point of crisis: the faun declares that her final task requires that he take blood from her infant brother, since only the blood of an innocent will complete her mission. Ofelia must then choose between sacrificing the life of her brother for the sake of her own immortality or sacrificing her immortality for the sake of her brother. Ofelia chooses the latter. She relinquishes her own regal-divine identity for the sake of another. She denies glory and power for herself in order that her brother may live. In other words, she chooses the cross in his place and on his behalf. Ofelia elects death that life might come to others.

Ofelia’s death at the hands of the Captain is a tragic and deeply unsettling event.[Fn6] Like the crucifixion of Jesus, her death appears to be the victory of evil. She seems to have failed her final task, and her horrific death only compounds the already great sense of devastation. And yet it is her blood that becomes the innocent sacrifice. Her death is the completion of the mission. What seems like failure turns out to be, in fact, her greatest victory. Ofelia’s apparently senseless death is in fact the occasion for her brother’s life and her own ascension to the right hand of her father. With her death, Ofelia enters the throne room of the Real, the place where her father and mother sit in heavenly splendor, and where she takes her place as the princess she truly is. And as if the biblical allusions were not strong enough, Ofelia hears from her father what essentially amounts to, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

As that final scene indicates, Pan’s Labyrinth can also be interpreted from another angle entirely, in which Ofelia is not the princess-savior but the princess-pilgrim. Her pilgrimage begins not because of some wild imagination, but rather because of her childlike faith. She embarks on a journey that reveals itself to her due to the pure receptivity of her faith. But Ofelia, like any true human, is not perfect; like any other person, she makes mistakes and even falls to temptation in the second task. Ofelia is thus a kind of Everyman or Everywoman, and her life is in movement toward a telos that comes to her, finally, as a gift. When, at the end, she is reunited with her mother and father, we see that the three of them are connected both by a blood relation and, most importantly, by a kind of spiritual relation. All three of them gave up their lives in sacrificial love—the father as a tailor for the army who received no honor, the mother in giving birth to Ofelia’s infant brother, and finally Ofelia herself also giving away her life for her brother. The three are united in regal splendor because all three were “good and faithful servants.”

The film sharply contrasts the way of life characterized by Ofelia and her family and the way of life characterized by the Captain. Not only are the former marked by sacrificial love, they are also marked by a radical commitment to peace in the midst of war and violence. According to del Toro, “Everybody else here or there [in the film] chooses violence; the girl chooses not to exert [violence].” The contrast is not simply limited to peace versus violence, though this is a central motif throughout the film. The larger dialectic in the story is between “the way of life and the way of death” (Jer. 21:8). Ofelia chooses life, while the Captain chooses death (cf. Deut. 30:19). Ofelia is defined by bringing life to others (her first task involves bringing a dead tree back to life), while the Captain takes like away from others. Ofelia seeks peace for all, while the Captain seeks bellum totum—total war. Ofelia chooses to affirm the humanity of others, while the Captain chooses to dehumanize his enemies, which includes even Ofelia and her mother.[Fn7] For the Captain, all things in the world are means toward some other end: Ofelia’s mother is a means toward having a son, the captured rebels are tortured as a means toward military victory, and those who work for the Captain are means toward building his power and reputation. However, the film graphically and profoundly portrays the Captain’s proclivity for murder as the one act which has no rationale. Murder is utterly senseless, and the fact that Ofelia’s murder is really a life-giving self-sacrifice changes nothing about the Captain’s irrational brutality. Her sacrifice is simply a testament to the way Reality works in and through everyday reality, transforming violence into peace and death into life. In light of this tension between Ofelia and the Captain—between the way of life and the way of death—it is particularly interesting to note how insistent the Captain is that she call him “father,” and how persistently Ofelia denies him that title.

If we look at this film as a fantastical portrayal of Christian existence—that is, truly human existence—then we have in Ofelia a portrayal of what it means to live in obedience to one’s calling. Her life was entirely shaped by her mission—a peaceful mission of sacrificial, life-giving love. In the midst of a world crashing down around her, Ofelia pursued a new world: one in which the monsters of the underworld are both more real and more significant than the monsters of the human world; one in which she has a valuable role to play and her identity is affirmed as having inestimable worth; one in which she can truly bring about a change from evil to good and from death to life. This “new world” or Real world is not the perfect paradise we might secretly desire when we are caught in the midst of an earthly hell. On the contrary, the Real world Ofelia discovers is full of its own horrors and imperfections and dangers. It is not the world that she wants, but it is the world that she has. Similarly, in Gethsemane, Jesus comes to grips with the fact that the way of the cross may not be the world that he wants, but it is the world to which he is called. Ofelia discovers a world which is neither a dream nor a nightmare but simply a Reality that comes to her, unannounced and unexpected—a world in which she must find her way as a pilgrim who knows her true identity despite all appearances to the contrary.

In both my Christological and anthropological readings of Pan’s Labyrinth, the nature of identity thus remains the central emphasis. At the beginning of this reflection, I referred to Ofelia’s mission as an attempt to establish her identity, but the story is actually more complex than this. Before she even begins the first task, Ofelia discovers—based on the faun’s suggestion—that she has the mark of the moon on her shoulder. Her very identity as the princess is secure long before she completes the final task. In other words, her life is ordered toward a particular telos prior to and apart from the actual confirmation of this identity through her own actions. Ofelia is set apart for a mission that comes to her from without and does not depend solely upon her response. Ofelia’s identity is a gift, and as she discovers this new world unfolding before her, she also discovers herself.

If Ofelia is marked from the start in terms of her regal identity, she is also marked in terms of her mission. Here the film uses classical irony, meaning the audience knows something the character does not. The film actually begins, presumably, at the end; the opening scene shows a young girl dead, blood running down her nose. Much like the opening of Memento, time runs backwards and the blood returns to her body as the scene cuts and the narrative of Ofelia begins. One might read this opening scene in two ways: either this is the end of Ofelia, the girl that we meet subsequently in Pan’s Labyrinth, or this could be a previous incarnation of the princess which then sets up the story of Ofelia. Either way, the tragic death of the innocent encompasses the story. We begin and end with a horrific death. To draw another Christological parallel, in the same way that Jesus’ life is ordered from the moment of incarnation toward the cross, so too in Pan’s Labyrinth, we know from the very beginning that Ofelia’s life is ordered toward a terrible end. Her identity as Princess Morana comes with a mission that ends with her own cross.

I return now to the movie’s tagline: “Innocence Has A Power Evil Cannot Imagine.” The relation between Ofelia and the Captain is clearly the central protagonist-antagonist or thesis-antithesis relation in the film. Ofelia represents goodness and innocence and love; the Captain, evil and guilt and hate. In our everyday human world—a world thoroughly shaped by Nietzsche and the “will to power”—the Captain seems to be the one who wields power and influence. Ofelia seemingly represents weakness and impotence. And yet, contra Nietzsche, Pan’s Labyrinth reveals the subversive power of love. If one had to pick another tagline, it would have to be 1 Cor. 1:27-28:

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.

This passage from Paul’s letter refers most directly to the proclamation of “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23) which demonstrates that “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (v. 25). Again, the analogy between Ofelia and Christ is important. Ofelia, like Christ, is foolish and weak and despised in the eyes of the “real” world. She has no apparent power to alter the course of reality. Her subjugation to the Captain seems complete and her failure seems final. Her death, like the death of Christ, appears to be the victory of evil and the confirmation of Nietzsche.

Yet, according to Paul, it is precisely the crucified Christ who is the Lord of glory. The ignoble cross is the axis of history and the center of human existence. In precisely this way, Ofelia’s death is the event in which the weak shames the strong, in which innocence triumphs victorious over evil. Even more significantly, Paul writes that God chose “things that are not to reduce to nothing things that are.” Is this not exactly what we see in Pan’s Labyrinth? The fantastical world of “things that are not”—at least, according to the standards set by the human-historical world—is what reduces to nothing “things that are.” What seems to be nothing ends up changing everything. This is precisely how the film is a critically realistic narrative: the film does not merely criticize human strength, human violence, and human dehumanization; the film reduces such things to naught through the subversive victory of the new world—the spiritual, Real world—actualized in the life and death of Ofelia.

In conclusion, though Guillermo del Toro grew up as a devout Catholic, he eventually left the faith. He explains the transition from faith to doubt as follows:

I was a choir boy. I was a member of the Virgin Mary Society. And I was this and I was that. And then, when you reach your teenage years, I discovered that the world was much wider. I started working in a place where I had to go through the morgue. One day I saw such a horrifying sight at the morgue that instantly showed me there was no real order in the universe, at least not a conscious order dictated by a guy in white robes and a long beard. It really shook me. [Terry Gross asks: “What did you see?”] I saw a pile of fetuses that was about five feet tall. There was such a harrowing variety of things going on there on every level [at the morgue]. I just realized, I guess we are on our own, so we better make the best of it. It’s this world that I saw that made me love with a passion the world that I was creating.

What changed del Toro was the problem of evil.[Fn8] The haunting reality in which we live was simply too anarchic to be the domain of a loving, all-powerful God. And consequently he began to make films that were themselves anarchic in character, stories that were in rebellion against the rebelliousness of this present world. As he admitted, “horror and fantasy saved my brain” and “allowed me to survive” in the midst of such a difficult, violent, and confusing adolescence.

In the end, how did del Toro get so much of the gospel right in Pan’s Labyrinth, even though he got so much of the gospel wrong growing up? Del Toro has the mistaken view that Christianity is simply a religion that protects you from hell and conforms a person into a particular religious mold. And he is not alone in holding such a view. Christianity was and often still is part and parcel of the Establishment. As part of the cultural-historical framework, Christianity said Yes to the world; it was an uncritical faith that adapted and conformed to reality. Christianity blessed the world’s injustices rather than rebelling against them. All of this is still too often true today. Thus, del Toro feels compelled in his own artistic works to carry out the rebellion which religion failed to do. In doing so, he ended up discovering the gospel.

Pan’s Labyrinth is thus, in many ways, a testament to what the gospel truly is—a gospel of anarchic liberation. Christianity is properly a religion of rebellion and revolution. The Christian faith subverts the Establishment in the event of the cross and actualizes a new world in the event of the resurrection. Like the film, the Christian faith is a critically realistic narrative of redemption. The gospel does not uncritically affirm this world but instead looks wholeheartedly toward the eschatological coming of true Reality. As Karl Barth emphatically stated, “Christianity which is not wholly and completely and without remainder eschatology has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ.” The gospel of liberation says No at the same time that it says Yes: No to the old Establishment and Yes to the new world, No to injustice and oppression and Yes to righteousness and freedom; No to dehumanizing violence and Yes to rehumanizing peace; No to life-denying death and Yes to death-denying life. We find the same gospel of liberation in Pan’s Labyrinth: No to the world of the Captain and Yes to the world of Ofelia.

Pan’s Labyrinth is finally a testament to the power of art. The old adage, “All truth is God’s truth wherever it may be found,” is nowhere more evident than here. If there is anything this profound film demonstrates, it is that when we delve wholly into story, we discover the Story; when we seek reality, we discover Reality; when we pursue truth, we discover Truth. All of this, of course, is the gift of grace. And that is precisely what Pan’s Labyrinth is: a taste of grace in an often graceless world. For this, we should be truly grateful.

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Fn1. Del Toro’s other film, The Devil’s Backbone, sets up Pan’s Labyrinth historically because of its setting in the Spanish Civil War.

Fn2. The Christological parallels in Hellboy are obvious as well, but they are less developed and the incarnation is of a very different sort. Pan’s Labyrinth is more fully and profoundly a re-telling of the gospel in fairytale form.

Fn3. This false distinction between objective and subjective is precisely what Terry Gross of NPR consistently applied to the film in her interview with Guillermo del Toro—which he had to correct. Gross spoke of the conflict between the Captain and the rebels as the “reality part of the film,” and later, when del Toro rejected this statement by speaking of “the girl’s reality,” she continued to misunderstand him and talk about how we often feel the need to fabricate stories in order to get through life. This forced him to make much more explicit his rejection of the hard and fast distinction between reality and fiction. Del Toro also made the especially fascinating statement that whereas an adult “invites Jesus into her heart,” a young child “invites monsters into her heart.” There are two ways of reading this statement, as del Toro intimated. On one hand, you can view Jesus as just a subjective figment of the imagination. On the other hand, you can affirm monsters to be as real to children as Jesus is to adults. Del Toro prefers the latter interpretation.

Fn4. According to del Toro, the critical fairytales and horror films are ones that show the monsters in a favorable light and show the humans as the real monsters. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the Captain is the true monster.

Fn5. Another notable, though often unrecognized, film in this genre is In America. Finding Neverland is critical, but not realistic; that is, it posits the need for an alternative but cannot finally sustain such an alternative vision. The point of Peter Pan is that Neverland is not paradise but hell. A land where you cannot grow up is a land where you cannot mature; and thus it is finally a land where you cannot be truly human. The Narnia tales by C. S. Lewis reside somewhere between Pan’s Labyrinth and Finding Neverland—more realistic than the latter, but more escapist than the former. Compared to these other two stories, Narnia offers a truly dialectical alternative; that is, Narnia has its own autonomous existence. The world of 20th century Britain and the world of Narnia exist side-by-side with no necessary interrelation. Narnia is critical of the modern human world, but it is not realistic enough to impinge upon this world. That is, Narnia is more of an escape from the confines of modern social propriety rather than a constructive alternative which could conceivably impact how one ought to live in the world of humans. If there is such an effect, it is more accidental than necessary. Evidence of this strictly dialectical relation is confirmed by Lewis’ own admission that Narnia is not a retelling of our own world but rather an imaginative attempt to conceive of a separate autonomous cosmos in which Christ is a Lion rather than a human.

Fn6. From a theological standpoint, it is perhaps unfortunate—when reading this film Christologically—that the man who kills Ofelia, the Captain, is the very one who calls himself her “father.” For this very reason, we should be cautious about drawing the parallel too closely. Not only will do an injustice to the film; we will also do an injustice to the Christian faith. That said, we should point out that the Captain is not actually Ofelia’s father; he only claims the title, though Ofelia refuses to affirm it. We finally meet Ofelia’s father at the end of the film. An equally justified Christological reading of the film would be to see the Captain as a fictional embodiment of the Devil. Here the analogy to the Christian faith is not ideal, but it is at least a model of the atonement that finds some support in the ancient tradition.

Fn7. Del Toro: “That type of obedience, where you find refuge in the corporate, or when you find refuge in the political or religious majority, is such an absolutely despicable cowardice—the cowardice that the Captain displayed by making the others non-human so he can torture or kill them.”

Fn8. There was also a positive side to his experience of violence and evil: “[Violence] made me very conscious of dying, decay, and fragility. I think we live our lives sometimes believing we are immortal, and we’re not. And our lives actually gain more sense when we believe in pain and when we believe in mortality. I believe that it makes us better to connect with this dark side of life.”