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Feb. 1st, 2007 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sexy_romulanWe just got home from seeing Pan's Labyrinth.
Holy shit.
I walked out of the theatre shaking. It was that good and that horrifying.
This movie understood, better than anything I've ever seen, how fantasy and fairy tales can cut straight to the bone. It interweaves the heroine's imaginary world and her life in 1944 Spain, where she and her sick and pregnant mother have come to live with her fascist military stepfather. The imaginary world stays perfectly imaginary to everyone but the heroine, from start to finish - it never intrudes on the real world in any irrefutable way - and yet somehow these two realities combine into something you can't look away from or dismiss, and everything becomes more nightmarish and horrible than either of the two sides could have given us standing alone.
Take the creature, sort of humanoid, with a mouth and...nose? eyes?...that sits sleeping at a table in front of a sumptuous feast, with a fire in the hearth. The walls are red. On the ceiling there are paintings of a creature - clearly this same one - killing and torturing children. We can hear echoes of them screaming.
We see, with the roaring hearthfire in the background, a substantial, dusty pile of little shoes.
Now, that would totally take the Silent Hill award all on its own, never mind when the thing wakes up. But put this in the middle of a story set in that time and that place, revolving around a man whose brutal and unflinching violence we see several examples of. The creature in the red room lends the brutal man and his brutal war the uncanny intensity of a nightmare, and the man makes the creature something you're never safe from. They both become horribly real.
This is a movie that affirms there are monsters. It makes you believe it.
Holy shit.
I walked out of the theatre shaking. It was that good and that horrifying.
This movie understood, better than anything I've ever seen, how fantasy and fairy tales can cut straight to the bone. It interweaves the heroine's imaginary world and her life in 1944 Spain, where she and her sick and pregnant mother have come to live with her fascist military stepfather. The imaginary world stays perfectly imaginary to everyone but the heroine, from start to finish - it never intrudes on the real world in any irrefutable way - and yet somehow these two realities combine into something you can't look away from or dismiss, and everything becomes more nightmarish and horrible than either of the two sides could have given us standing alone.
Take the creature, sort of humanoid, with a mouth and...nose? eyes?...that sits sleeping at a table in front of a sumptuous feast, with a fire in the hearth. The walls are red. On the ceiling there are paintings of a creature - clearly this same one - killing and torturing children. We can hear echoes of them screaming.
We see, with the roaring hearthfire in the background, a substantial, dusty pile of little shoes.
Now, that would totally take the Silent Hill award all on its own, never mind when the thing wakes up. But put this in the middle of a story set in that time and that place, revolving around a man whose brutal and unflinching violence we see several examples of. The creature in the red room lends the brutal man and his brutal war the uncanny intensity of a nightmare, and the man makes the creature something you're never safe from. They both become horribly real.
This is a movie that affirms there are monsters. It makes you believe it.
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Date: 2007-02-03 09:31 pm (UTC)Yai.