KEY POINTS:
Do apologise to the kids on your way out to this.
The star of Pan's Labyrinth may be an 11-year-old who finds she could be a princess in an underworld of locust-like fairies, a faun and a giant toad. But this is the Labyrinth of Guillermo Del Toro
- the Mexican director whose twisted sensibilities have long rubbed horror up against the real world - not the muppet-infested one David Bowie chased a young Jennifer Connelly around 20 years ago.
Because it's sure not for kids. But it will possibly affect you the same way as when you heard your first fairytale which didn't end happily ever after.
And set against fascist Spain of 1944, what's on terra firma is just as terrifying as what young bookworm Ofelia (Baquero) encounters in her subterranean adventures.
Actually, what's so confounding about this is how beautifully it manages to make its two worlds - one specifically political, historic and full of grim human drama, the other magical and nightmarish - into such a captivating, heartbreaking film.
It's hard to know who you would rather encounter - the child-eating Pale Man (Doug Jones) who carries his eyes in his hands and who Ofelia must avoid on one of her set tasks, or Captain Vidal, her soldier stepfather who relishes torturing anyone he suspects of being a partisan and whose only regard for her mother Carmen is because she is pregnant with his son.
They're both some pieces of work in a film that doesn't lack for hideous creatures.
The combination of magic, civil war and Spain does beg allusions to Goya, and Pan's Oscar-winning cinematography and art direction has echoes of everything from his The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid to his madder, more mythological works.
That's not to say that Pan's is some esoteric creation of high-minded art-referenced detachment. Well it's certainly not bloodless - it comes with some flinch-inducing gore.
But it's also an affecting fable, made more so especially by the luminous performance of young Baquero and the truly frightening two worlds she finds herself in. Add a brilliant ending which upends the usual finale rules of fairytales with something as wondrous as it is devastating, and not only is this the best Spanish wartime fantasy horror fable since Del Toro's last one (The Devil's Backbone, 2001 ) but an original and a classic. Just go (sorry kids). And Be A-Mazed.
Cast: Ivana Baquero, Ariadna Gil, Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Rating: R16, violence, offensive language, horror
Running time: 112 mins
Screening: SkyCity, Rialto, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas
