Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
★★½ — Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Go on then, I'll say it: Pan's Labyrinth left me cold. I know that's not a popular position. I know the film has a devoted following, and I know that admitting you didn't connect with it tends to earn you a suspicious look, like you've confessed to not liking music or sunsets. But here we are. Two and a half stars, hand on heart, and I'm not entirely sure I'd rush back.
Which makes it a genuinely strange film to write about, because I can see exactly what it's doing and I can see it being done well. Guillermo del Toro is working at full stretch here. The production design is extraordinary, rich and strange and soaked in fairy-tale menace. The creature work is flat-out brilliant. The Pale Man, all slack skin and hand-mounted eyes, is one of the more unsettling screen creations of recent memory, the kind of image that earns its place in the nightmares of a generation. And the film looks stunning throughout, deep reds pooling against inky blacks, every frame dripping with a carefully composed gloom. There's no question del Toro has an eye, and no question he's deployed it ambitiously here.
The premise is bold, too. Setting a dark fantasy against the backdrop of post-Civil War Spain, weaving fairy-tale logic around the brutal realities of fascism, is a genuine swing. The real-world villain, a cold and sadistic military captain, is genuinely frightening in a way that pure fantasy monsters rarely manage to be, because his cruelty has weight and consequence. That side of the film works.
The trouble, for me, is that the two worlds never properly fused. Young Ofelia moves between harsh reality and elaborate fantasy, and I understood what del Toro was reaching for. The idea that a child builds a mythic inner world to survive an unbearable outer one is a meaningful idea, and there's real emotional logic to it. But I never felt it. The fantasy sequences, beautiful as they are, started to feel like interruptions rather than illuminations. They sit alongside the real-world horror rather than deepening it, and the symbolism is pressed so hard and so often that it started to feel like the film didn't quite trust me to pick it up on my own. Heavy-handed is the word. The film keeps nudging you, making sure you've clocked the allegory, when the most powerful allegories tend to work by not announcing themselves quite so loudly.
The tone is the other issue. Del Toro is moving between grim realism and mythic fable, and those are genuinely difficult registers to hold together. Sometimes it works. Often it lurches. The shifts don't always feel earned, and when they don't, the seams show.
I think of something like Viy (1967), a film that manages to be folkloric and frightening in a way that feels fully integrated, where the supernatural and the human are genuinely inseparable. Pan's Labyrinth keeps them at arm's length from each other, and that distance is exactly where my emotional connection fell through the gap.
None of this is to say the film isn't worth watching. It clearly is, and clearly millions of people have found in it something that moved them deeply. I don't begrudge them that. Del Toro's ambition is real, his craft is evident, and there are sequences here that are as visually striking as anything you'll see from that era. But for me, it remained a film to be admired rather than felt. I sat outside it the whole way through, appreciating the artistry, noticing the skill, and waiting for the moment it would finally pull me in. That moment never came.
Two and a half stars. Respect without affection. I can see why people love it. It just wasn't for me.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2006 | Watched: 2025-07-30
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Studiocanal Presents Amazon Channel
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
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