Pan's Labyrinth (click for site)

After seeing this film, even hearing a little bit of the soundtrack (a wordless lullaby hummed to the young girl who is the center of the tale) is enough to make me incredibly sad. At the same time it brings to mind some of the most imaginative and incredibly rendered imagery I have seen in a long time.

"Pan's Labyrinth" is the story of a young girl who travels with her pregnant mother to live with her mother's new husband in a rural area in northern Spain, 1944, after Franco's victory. The girl lives in an imaginary world of her own creation, but this world is so vivid and so seamlessly interacts with her real world, that part of you wants to believe it's true. It is easy to suspend disbelief when a grasshopper is sentient, and then changes shape. First you are drawn in by the magic of it, and then you want it to be real because certainly no child's life is so fraught with such dark anguish. You WANT her to be a reincarnated princess whose time on earth has returned.

This story is what Anne Frank's would have been if she had used allegory to describe her situation to the world. The young girl in the movie even looks like Anne Frank. I'm not sure if that's intentional. She lives in a world that despite her seeming freedom to walk around and to explore, unlike Anne, she is trapped in a tiny crawlspace.

The director manages to sustain a level of anxiety throughout the entire film. You have no idea what will happen next, you just know it's not going to be good. My only problem with it was the antagonist's 'monsterhood' - but if he were less violent and more subtle in his hatred of her and her mother, the girl would not have been forced to develop a second reality. And the violence... well, I didn't see a lot of it but it was constant.

There are so many themes and echoes of various cultural myths that I'm still unraveling them. It deserves its accolades and will win many prizes. But be warned, it is going to haunt you for a long time.