Pan's Labyrinth: The Fairy Tale as Resistance

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

There is a moment in Pan’s Labyrinth that tells you what kind of film you are watching, and it has no monster in it at all. A captain of Franco’s army sits at his dinner table, brings a glass bottle down onto a peasant’s face, keeps hitting until the face is ruined, and then goes back to his meal. No score swells. The camera does not flinch or cut away for mercy. Guillermo del Toro stages the worst violence in his 2006 film in the daylit, wallpapered world of grown men in uniform, and he reserves his tenderness for the toad under the tree and the faun in the maze. That is the whole argument of the picture, made in one gesture: the fantastical is the safe place, and the human world is where the real horror lives.

Dark Fantasy - vo.rs

Pan's Labyrinth: The Fairy Tale as Resistance