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Feb. 1st, 2007 09:14 pmWe 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.
( Cut for possible spoiler - not so much giving away plot as describing one of the coolest scenes. )
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.
( Cut for possible spoiler - not so much giving away plot as describing one of the coolest scenes. )
This is a movie that affirms there are monsters. It makes you believe it.
