Pan's Labyrinth (2006): At 20, Guillermo del Toro's Dark Fairy Tale Is About a Girl Who Learns to Say No

Ofelia has been told not to eat anything. The table in front of her runs the length of the room, heaped with roast meat and glazed fruit, and at its head sits a pale, sagging creature with an empty face and a plate of eyeballs set out before him like a first course. The fairies at her shoulder shake their heads, frantic. She takes a grape anyway. Then a second one.

In most fairy tales, that grape would be the whole lesson. In Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, it's only the rehearsal. This is a fairy tale about a girl learning to say no, and learning which no is worth her life. In his DVD commentary, as Roger Ebert recounted, del Toro called Ofelia "a girl who needs to disobey anything except her own soul." Twenty years on, that sounds less like a moral than a survival skill. On October 9 it returned to theaters in a new 4K version, with 3D and HDR options that del Toro oversaw; the 3D, he told Comic-Con in July, was done by hand, with "no goddamn AI."

Why It's a Masterpiece

Spain, 1944. Franco has won the civil war, and the last Republican guerrillas are hiding in the mountains. Eleven-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) arrives at a remote mill with her pregnant, ailing mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), to live with her new stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who is there to hunt the rebels down. In an overgrown labyrinth nearby, a towering faun (Doug Jones) tells her she is a lost underground princess, with three tasks between her and home.

Del Toro never lets either world be the safe one; as Ebert wrote, both impose rules that can get an 11-year-old killed. The faun's kingdom fills less than a fifth of the running time, as Michael Atkinson notes in his Criterion essay; the rest is the war. Early on, Vidal smashes a young farmer's face with a bottle, shoots him and his father, then finds rabbits in their bag, just as they'd insisted. He orders the rabbits cooked.

López makes Vidal frightening by making him tidy. Del Toro has said he modeled the captain on truly evil politicians: well dressed, well groomed, well spoken, rising from his chair whenever a lady enters or leaves the room. Watch him shave, drawing the razor across his reflected throat like a man who hates himself, as del Toro has put it, then wind his father's pocket watch. For him, order is a religion. Across the house stands Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), the housekeeper secretly helping the guerrillas in the hills, the only adult who looks at Ofelia and actually sees her.

Behind the Scenes

The film exists because of a London cab. After Blade II and Hellboy, del Toro was being offered superhero movies, and he admitted at a 15th-anniversary screening at the Academy Museum that he was tempted. Then he left his notebook of sketches and ideas in a taxi. When the driver returned it, del Toro took it as a sign. "I understand Lord, I'll do Pan's Labyrinth, but give me my notebook back," he remembered saying.

The bargain cost him. In a new Letterboxd interview he lists the disasters: the first financier pulled out, every American company passed, and some Spanish producers worked against him. After a huge forest fire, blanks and flames were banned, so he and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro faked blasts with backlit water and steam while actors mimed their rifles' recoil in silence. On a $19.3 million budget, everything was built. Del Toro says he lost a pound a day, slept one to three hours a night, and in postproduction begged producer Alfonso Cuarón to let him shelve the film and pay everyone back. He hasn't returned to Madrid since the premiere.

Then came Cannes on May 27, 2006, and an ovation widely reported as the festival's longest. The film went on to win three Oscars, for makeup, art direction and Navarro's cinematography.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• The priest's words are real. At Vidal's dinner party, the village priest says God doesn't care about prisoners' bodies because their souls are already saved. Del Toro said those lines come verbatim from a priest who gave communion to Republican prisoners in a fascist camp.
• Curves versus right angles. The faun's world is all wombs, roots and spirals; Vidal's world is straight corridors and squared-off rooms. Once you see it, every doorway tells you which world you're in.
• The shoes in the corner. In the Pale Man's dining hall, glance past the banquet to the heap of small children's shoes. In a film set in 1944, as Atkinson and Ebert both note, it's hard not to think of the camps.
• One actor, two monsters. Doug Jones plays both the faun and the Pale Man, a hint that the two may be connected.
• A song with no words. Javier Navarrete's Oscar-nominated score is built around a lullaby, the one Mercedes hums to Ofelia in the dark.

The Director's Genius Moment

The Pale Man scene was built out of arguments. In the book Masters of Make-Up Effects, Oscar-winning makeup artist David Martí recalls del Toro rejecting design after design: a wooden man with drawers in his chest, a fat old man who suddenly turns thin. Then, mid-preproduction and out of money, del Toro pitched a horse skull bursting from the monster's mouth. Martí refused, they fought, and they cooled off. Later Martí asked: with no eyes, how does he find Ofelia?

Del Toro told him, "Close your eyes and try to find me." Martí reached out blindly, palms open, and del Toro drew eyes on his hands. When Martí protested that it made no sense, del Toro told him to think about magic instead. The final spark came from Jones in the makeup chair, closing and opening his hands in front of his face as if they were blinking. Jones has said the Pale Man took six hours to apply, an hour longer than the faun.

The genius is where del Toro puts it. He has said the Pale Man stands for fascism and the Church, devouring children while an obscenely rich banquet sits in front of them. Now rewind to Vidal's dinner party: another long table, another man at its head, the priest explaining why prisoners' bodies don't matter. The film serves the same feast twice, once as a dinner party and once as a nightmare, and dares you to say which is worse.

Another Way to See It

Watch it as Mercedes's story and it turns gentler. When Ofelia asks whether she believes in fairies, Mercedes says she used to, as a child. Del Toro once told an interviewer that "Mercedes is the future of Ofelia if Ofelia chose to stop believing." The carving at the labyrinth's heart shows a faun, a girl and a baby; later Ofelia holds her newborn brother; at the end, Mercedes does. Del Toro confirmed the rhyme: you're born into one family, he said, and find another on the way.

There's a history lens too. In 2006, Atkinson notes, the civil war was still a wound many Spaniards preferred to leave buried; the law condemning Franco's regime only passed in 2007. Del Toro made a film about what the grown-ups wouldn't discuss, told by the one person who kept asking.

Spoiler warning: The rest of this section and the next discuss the ending.

The doctor (Álex Angulo) is the film's adult answer to the grape. After he quietly ends a tortured prisoner's suffering, he tells Vidal that obeying without question is something only men like him do, then turns and walks away. Vidal shoots him in the back. In the finale, the faun demands a little of the baby's blood, and Ofelia, the girl who couldn't follow the rules about grapes, refuses the one order that would hurt someone else. Vidal, who can't see the faun, shoots her. Del Toro points out that she's the only character who chooses no violence at all, and the epilogue rewards her with a throne below and a single white flower opening on a dead tree above.

That's what the film does to us. It remembers exactly how it felt to be a child who knew the adults were lying, and it says a child's refusal can be the bravest act in the room. It doesn't pretend the refusal is free. Vidal dies asking that his son be told the hour of his death; Mercedes answers that the boy won't even know his name. The man of orders vanishes. The girl who disobeyed is remembered.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, but not with young kids. Despite the fairies, this is an R-rated war film with torture and close-up violence. Watch it in Spanish, lights off, with the English subtitles del Toro wrote himself.

Fathom billed the anniversary run for October 9 to 15, so check its site for any remaining dates; del Toro told Letterboxd that "if you haven't seen the 4K," you haven't seen the film. At home, it's on 4K disc and on Criterion's 2016 Blu-ray. For a next watch, try our review of One Battle After Another, where another uniformed man obsessed with his bloodline meets a daughter who won't do as she's told. On your rewatch, keep your eye on Vidal's pocket watch. He winds it like a man keeping time for an empire, and in the end it can't buy him even his son's memory. Ofelia's whole story fits in two grapes and one no.