Labyrinth (1986)

There's a moment in Labyrinth where you stop and think: what on earth are my parents letting me watch? A glam-rock demigod in skintight trousers is holding a baby hostage inside a M.C. Escher fever dream, and somehow it's being marketed to children. And yet, somehow, it works. More than works, actually. It lodges itself somewhere deep in your brain and stays there for decades.

Jim Henson's 1986 fantasy is one of those films that's genuinely hard to categorise. It's not quite a fairy tale, not quite a musical, not quite a creature feature. It's all three at once, glued together with felt and foam and an absolute refusal to play it safe. And that's precisely why so many of us who grew up with it carry a strange, fierce fondness for it. The film is beautifully weird in a way that very little cinema, for children or otherwise, manages to be.

The puppetry and animatronics are, honestly, staggering. I watched this again recently and kept catching myself leaning forward to work out how they'd done something, only to give up and just enjoy it. These aren't the kind of effects that get a pass because of their age. They genuinely hold up. There's a texture and a weight to the creatures that you simply can't replicate in post-production, and Henson's team knew it. If you want to see what that same sensibility looks like pushed even further into darkness, I'd point you towards my review of The Dark Crystal, which came out just a few years earlier and shares a lot of that same handcrafted soul.

Then there's David Bowie. Look, I'm not going to pretend the Goblin King doesn't come with a bit of baggage watching it in 2024. A fully-grown rock star in a cape and codpiece, obsessing over a teenage girl and her baby brother, feels rather different now than it did on a Friday night in the late '80s. But Bowie commits so completely to the absurdity of it that it's almost impossible not to be swept along. He plays it with this magnificent blend of menace and campness, never quite threatening enough to be frightening, never quite cuddly enough to be safe. It's iconic in the truest sense of the word, for better or worse.

Jennifer Connelly, though, is the real anchor of the whole thing. She's playing a teenage girl who's petulant and selfish and occasionally insufferable, and the film doesn't shy away from that. Sarah isn't immediately likeable, and Connelly plays that with real conviction. Her wide-eyed determination as she pushes through increasingly surreal obstacles carries the film through its wobblier stretches.

And there are wobblier stretches. The pacing sags in the middle in a way that a sharper edit could have fixed. Some sequences outstay their welcome by a good few minutes, which is a particular sin in a film aimed at younger audiences who will absolutely notice. The morality of the central plot, Sarah wishing her brother away and then having to reckon with that, is also a bit muddy when you pull at the threads. Not disqualifyingly so, but it's there.

None of that stops Labyrinth from being something genuinely special, though. It's the kind of film that doesn't exist in quite the same form anywhere else. Odd, creative, occasionally uncomfortable, and stuffed with invention. Hoggle alone earned a six-month residency as a recurring villain in my old D&D campaign, which I reckon is as good a measure of a film's staying power as any star rating.

It's not a classic in the strictest sense. The cracks are visible and the pacing lets it down when it should be soaring. But it's an absolutely committed cult favourite, and if you grew up with it, there's nothing I could say that would shake that. Nor would I want to.

Three and a half stars.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1986  | Watched: 2025-05-14

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads · ITVX Premium
Rent: Sky Store
Buy: Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu · fuboTV · Peacock Premium · Night Flight Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

More from Jim Henson: The Dark Crystal (1982)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More family: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Wonder (2017) · Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anastasia (1997)