Finally this evening I got to see PAN'S LABYRINTH [EL LABERINTO DEL FAUNO] - just in time as it's dvd release is this Monday! How's that for timing? Luckily it's constant appearance in film awards over the new year has kept it on the big screen and no doubt it's still running thanks to it's deserved 3 Academy Awards for cinematography, art direction and make-up.

After dinner with Owen at the Song Que Vietnamese restaurant across from the office which was filling but not all that, we 242'd it into the west end and saw the film at the Odeon Covent Garden - always will be the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue to me. Remarkably for such a high profile film I knew next to nothing about it apart from the general premise. Usually after a 3 month wait you are aware of certain scenes or set pieces from reviews or friends but not with this film which indeed might not have made it so involving.

1944. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is a loving but lonely girl, still grieving her father's death and not reconciled to the remarriage of her mother Carmen (Adriana Gil) to the domineering and brutal Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), a Captain in Franco's victorious Fascist army. At his insistence, the heavily pregnant Carmen along with Ofelia travel to the lonely village outpost where Vidal is attempting to rout the final straggling leftist guerrillas in the overlooking hill forest. Stopping in the forest near the final destination Ofelia restores a broken piece of gargoyle to it's rightful place. Later that night a fairy appears to her and leads her to an overgrown labyrinth close by and to a stone staircase spiralling down into the earth. An avid reader of fairy tales the girl descends to the bottom to discover an enormous Faun (Doug Jones) waiting for her to tell her she is in fact the long-lost daughter of the King of The Underworld and all she has to do is complete three dangerous tasks to be able to return to her life as a Princess.

She accepts the creepy challenge but is slowly made aware that the real horrors of the world lie in the evil that men do namely her sadistic stepfather who is happy to kill anyone he thinks is aiding the guerrillas. Will he discover that his stoic housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu) and the doctor treating his wife (Alex Angulo) are smuggling aid to the leftists - Mercedes' brother being the leader of the group. Torn between her knowledge of Mercedes' secret and her mother's waning health Ofelia puts all her trust in the Faun... but is he as dangerous as her stepfather?
I was gripped by the film from the start and was an emotional wreck by the end of it. The disturbing fantasy images are hard to shake off - notably the second of Ofelia's challenges where she meets a horrific creature that looks like Francis Bacon's Pope portrait come to life - and the bone-crunching violence dealt out by the evil Vidal nearly had me watching through latticed fingers.

The performances are excellent - Ivana Barquero's grave presence as the girl makes her very sympathetic, Sergi Lopez makes his Fascist stepfather the stuff of nightmares and Maribel Verdu's quietly powerful Mercedes was the real heart of the film - her confrontation with Lopez after he discovers her real identity was definitely edge-of-the-seat viewing. The supporting cast are also solid through and through with Angulo particularly fine as the principled doctor.

I am so glad I saw this first at the cinema - I think it's overall hypnotic power would have been dissipated on the small screen if I had seen it there first.

Guillermo del Toro's LABERINTO.., like his earlier film of Franco vs. the spirit world THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE, haunts the memory for hours afterwards.