Pan's Labyrinth
I am seriously disturbed.
Do not read if you don't want to get spoilers.
So yesterday Antonio and I picked up Pan's Labyrinth at Best Buy. We put out the lights, cuddled on the couch, and expected something entirely different than what we got.
The movie opens kind of slow, and in Spanish, which surprised me. I didn't know it wasn't in english, but when we realized it wasn't even dubbed into spanish, we just read the subtitles. I don't know if this is the only way to get this movie or not - I think it is - but it's worth it despite the language barrier.
Not ten minutes into the movie, I am freaking out. This little girl lost her dad years before, when she was just a baby I believe, and her mother remarries when she is about ten or so. The movie starts with the mother and daughter, Ofelia, moving to live with her stepfather and her mother is enormously pregnant. They stop on the road for the mother because she is sick, and Ofelia spots one of those really icky bugs that looks like a stick - she calls it a fairy. This is apparently where the main plotline begins, because after this they meet her stepfather Vidal - a cruel, yet spineless bastard that has no respect for any human life except his own and his future son, who will carry his name. The night Ofelia meets him, he smashes in a man's face with the blunt bottom of a glass bottle, completely crushing his face until it is concave, then shoots him and his father. This is where I started getting rather disgusted with this movie and I almost shut it off, but I am glad I didn't.
That night Ofelia follows the creepy little stick creature into the labyrinth behind her stepfathers house. She goes down a set of steps into a cavern, where she meets the faun. Now, those of you that have seen The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, expect fauns to be cute. This one is not.
He's creepy as hell, but he sees her and gets all excited. He claims she is a princess, reborn into a human body, and in order to become immortal and reunite with her father - who apparently awaits her in another world - she has to complete three tasks by the end of the full moon. He gives her a book and a little bag with a couple round stones in it, and tells her to open it when she is alone. She goes home with it, and opens it the next day, reading that her first task is to find a tree behind the mill where she lives that is dying because of a huge toad that has made a home in it's roots. She has to make it swallow the stones so she can get a golden key from it's belly. Now, her mother had made her a brand new dress and bought her brand new shoes to wear for a special dinner that night, and Ofelia is wearing them when she finds the tree, so she strips off to keep from getting dirty and hangs the dress on a tree limb before crawling through the opening in the roots to hunt the toad. She finds him, and tricks him into swallowing the stones by offering him a curled up bug with them, and after he eats them all, his body literally turns inside out, allowing her to get the key.
When Ofelia comes out with the key, she finds herself covered from head to toe in mud, and her dress had blown off the branch into a mud pubble. She stumbles home, where her mother has been humiliated by her new husband in front of all the guests after she tells a story, and Ofelia is sent to bed without supper. Her mother gets very ill that night, and so after only one trip down to see the faun she does not return. Ofelia is seperated from her mother to sleep in another room, and the faun visits her in the night, upset with her for not returning. He gives her a mandrake root - you may remember the screaming baby-like roots from Harry Potter, but this one is nothing like it. He tells her to put it in a bowl of fresh milk and put it under her mothers bed, feeding it two drops of blood a night. The moment Ofelia does so, the root comes alive, writhing and cooing like a newborn baby. It is freakishly disturbing, but it heals her mother enough to allow her to carry on with her pregnancy like normal.
For Ofelia's second task, she is given a piece of chalk and told to draw a door anywhere in her room to go to another place - the chalk drawing will open into a real door and take her away from her world into another. She is given, by the faun, three fairies and told to open a lock with the golden key from the last task. She is also told a feast will be on the table in the room she is taken to, but she must not eat anything from it, because her life depends on it. When she goes home that night and creates the door, she sets up an hourglass in front of it as her time limit to open the lock and return to her world, otherwise the door closes.
Once inside the room, she finds the feast...and this.
The creature has no eyes, and they are on a plate in front of it. The creature never moves, and it has two holes in its face that look bloody - you assume the eyes go here. They do not, but we don't see it yet.
Ofelia lets loose the fairies and turns behind the table to find the locks. The fairies point to one, but she chooses to open another, finding inside it a shiny dagger. She puts it in a pocket and starts to leave, then is distracted by the table of food. Though the fairies try to stop her, she plucks a grape (a freaking grape?!) off the table and eats it...and behind her the creature comes to life. Which is when we recall all the paintings on the walls of the creature eating babies and get seriously freaked out, because it picks up its eyes, and it looks like this:
It eats two of her fairies, and she races back to the door to find it closing. She quickly draws another door above it, and crawls out and away from the creature just in time to escape. (I am convinced by this time that I will have nightmares.) Infuriated at her disobedience, the faun refuses to give her the third task.
Meanwhile, Vidal becomes increasingly vicious, torturing a captured rebel. (There is a sort of secondary plotline about rebels in the mountains - be aware this movie is set in the very early 1900's. Vidal also kills the doctor who euthanized the tortured prisoner to stop his pain, because he discovered the doctor was helping the rebels. Vidal catches Ofelia tending to the mandrake root. Her mother throws it into the fireplace, where it then begins to scream. Instantly, she develops painful contractions and dies giving birth to a son. Vidal discovers that one of the maids is a spy, and he captures her and Ofelia as they attempt to escape. Ofelia is locked in her bedroom, and the maid is taken to be tortured; however, she frees herself using a hidden knife, and attacks Vidal, stabbing him front and back twice, then shoving the knife into his mouth and pulling it out sideways, splitting his face at the seam of his lips to the middle of his cheek. She then flees into the woods where the rebels rescue her.
The faun returns to Ofelia and gives her one more chance to prove herself. He tells her to take her baby brother into the labyrinth. Ofelia steals the baby after sedating Vidal with some of the medication the previous doctor had been giving her, and although disoriented, Vidal continues to chase her through the labyrinth while the rebels attack the mill. The faun tells Ofelia that the portal to the underworld will open only with an innocent's blood, so he needs a drop of her brother's blood. Ofelia refuses to harm her brother and the faun disappears. Vidal finds her, takes the baby and shoots Ofelia. They don't really show that part - he shoots, she jerks, and then she falls over near the opening of the faun's home. They also show the fact that even though the maze opened for Ofelia to let her hide from Vidal, when he finds her talking to the faun, the faun is invisible to him...so you can't tell if this is all really in her head or not.
When he leaves the labyrinth the rebels and the maid are waiting for him. Knowing that he will die, he calmly hands the maid the baby. He takes out his watch, ready to break it, and tells her to tell his son when he grows up what time his father died, reflecting his own father's death. She refuses, telling him that his son will never even know his name. Pedro, one of the rebels and her brother, draws his weapon and shoots Vidal, killing him. Thank God - he was a psycho.
The maid comes into the labyrinth looking for Ofelia, and finds her dying. As the maid hums her a lullaby, drops of Ofelia's blood drips onto the altar which was the gateway into the underworld. Ofelia seems to hallicunate, and finds herself in a grand hall in fancy clothes, where atop two of three tall altars are her mother and father. The faun is there with his fairy pets flying around him (including the ones previously eaten by the monster). She learns that by giving up the eternal life as the princess to save her baby brother, she has completed the final task and proven herself to be the Princess Moanna. The scene changes back to the one where she is dying - Ofelia smiles, and then she passes on. And the movie ends.
I might mention at this point that the lullaby the maid is humming is seriously freaky - it's part of the soundtrack as well, going along with music, but before I even saw the movie that little tune gave me the creeps.
Go rent it. It's awesome :D
Do not read if you don't want to get spoilers.
So yesterday Antonio and I picked up Pan's Labyrinth at Best Buy. We put out the lights, cuddled on the couch, and expected something entirely different than what we got.
The movie opens kind of slow, and in Spanish, which surprised me. I didn't know it wasn't in english, but when we realized it wasn't even dubbed into spanish, we just read the subtitles. I don't know if this is the only way to get this movie or not - I think it is - but it's worth it despite the language barrier.
Not ten minutes into the movie, I am freaking out. This little girl lost her dad years before, when she was just a baby I believe, and her mother remarries when she is about ten or so. The movie starts with the mother and daughter, Ofelia, moving to live with her stepfather and her mother is enormously pregnant. They stop on the road for the mother because she is sick, and Ofelia spots one of those really icky bugs that looks like a stick - she calls it a fairy. This is apparently where the main plotline begins, because after this they meet her stepfather Vidal - a cruel, yet spineless bastard that has no respect for any human life except his own and his future son, who will carry his name. The night Ofelia meets him, he smashes in a man's face with the blunt bottom of a glass bottle, completely crushing his face until it is concave, then shoots him and his father. This is where I started getting rather disgusted with this movie and I almost shut it off, but I am glad I didn't.
That night Ofelia follows the creepy little stick creature into the labyrinth behind her stepfathers house. She goes down a set of steps into a cavern, where she meets the faun. Now, those of you that have seen The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, expect fauns to be cute. This one is not.
He's creepy as hell, but he sees her and gets all excited. He claims she is a princess, reborn into a human body, and in order to become immortal and reunite with her father - who apparently awaits her in another world - she has to complete three tasks by the end of the full moon. He gives her a book and a little bag with a couple round stones in it, and tells her to open it when she is alone. She goes home with it, and opens it the next day, reading that her first task is to find a tree behind the mill where she lives that is dying because of a huge toad that has made a home in it's roots. She has to make it swallow the stones so she can get a golden key from it's belly. Now, her mother had made her a brand new dress and bought her brand new shoes to wear for a special dinner that night, and Ofelia is wearing them when she finds the tree, so she strips off to keep from getting dirty and hangs the dress on a tree limb before crawling through the opening in the roots to hunt the toad. She finds him, and tricks him into swallowing the stones by offering him a curled up bug with them, and after he eats them all, his body literally turns inside out, allowing her to get the key.
When Ofelia comes out with the key, she finds herself covered from head to toe in mud, and her dress had blown off the branch into a mud pubble. She stumbles home, where her mother has been humiliated by her new husband in front of all the guests after she tells a story, and Ofelia is sent to bed without supper. Her mother gets very ill that night, and so after only one trip down to see the faun she does not return. Ofelia is seperated from her mother to sleep in another room, and the faun visits her in the night, upset with her for not returning. He gives her a mandrake root - you may remember the screaming baby-like roots from Harry Potter, but this one is nothing like it. He tells her to put it in a bowl of fresh milk and put it under her mothers bed, feeding it two drops of blood a night. The moment Ofelia does so, the root comes alive, writhing and cooing like a newborn baby. It is freakishly disturbing, but it heals her mother enough to allow her to carry on with her pregnancy like normal.
For Ofelia's second task, she is given a piece of chalk and told to draw a door anywhere in her room to go to another place - the chalk drawing will open into a real door and take her away from her world into another. She is given, by the faun, three fairies and told to open a lock with the golden key from the last task. She is also told a feast will be on the table in the room she is taken to, but she must not eat anything from it, because her life depends on it. When she goes home that night and creates the door, she sets up an hourglass in front of it as her time limit to open the lock and return to her world, otherwise the door closes.
Once inside the room, she finds the feast...and this.
The creature has no eyes, and they are on a plate in front of it. The creature never moves, and it has two holes in its face that look bloody - you assume the eyes go here. They do not, but we don't see it yet.
Ofelia lets loose the fairies and turns behind the table to find the locks. The fairies point to one, but she chooses to open another, finding inside it a shiny dagger. She puts it in a pocket and starts to leave, then is distracted by the table of food. Though the fairies try to stop her, she plucks a grape (a freaking grape?!) off the table and eats it...and behind her the creature comes to life. Which is when we recall all the paintings on the walls of the creature eating babies and get seriously freaked out, because it picks up its eyes, and it looks like this:
It eats two of her fairies, and she races back to the door to find it closing. She quickly draws another door above it, and crawls out and away from the creature just in time to escape. (I am convinced by this time that I will have nightmares.) Infuriated at her disobedience, the faun refuses to give her the third task.
Meanwhile, Vidal becomes increasingly vicious, torturing a captured rebel. (There is a sort of secondary plotline about rebels in the mountains - be aware this movie is set in the very early 1900's. Vidal also kills the doctor who euthanized the tortured prisoner to stop his pain, because he discovered the doctor was helping the rebels. Vidal catches Ofelia tending to the mandrake root. Her mother throws it into the fireplace, where it then begins to scream. Instantly, she develops painful contractions and dies giving birth to a son. Vidal discovers that one of the maids is a spy, and he captures her and Ofelia as they attempt to escape. Ofelia is locked in her bedroom, and the maid is taken to be tortured; however, she frees herself using a hidden knife, and attacks Vidal, stabbing him front and back twice, then shoving the knife into his mouth and pulling it out sideways, splitting his face at the seam of his lips to the middle of his cheek. She then flees into the woods where the rebels rescue her.
The faun returns to Ofelia and gives her one more chance to prove herself. He tells her to take her baby brother into the labyrinth. Ofelia steals the baby after sedating Vidal with some of the medication the previous doctor had been giving her, and although disoriented, Vidal continues to chase her through the labyrinth while the rebels attack the mill. The faun tells Ofelia that the portal to the underworld will open only with an innocent's blood, so he needs a drop of her brother's blood. Ofelia refuses to harm her brother and the faun disappears. Vidal finds her, takes the baby and shoots Ofelia. They don't really show that part - he shoots, she jerks, and then she falls over near the opening of the faun's home. They also show the fact that even though the maze opened for Ofelia to let her hide from Vidal, when he finds her talking to the faun, the faun is invisible to him...so you can't tell if this is all really in her head or not.
When he leaves the labyrinth the rebels and the maid are waiting for him. Knowing that he will die, he calmly hands the maid the baby. He takes out his watch, ready to break it, and tells her to tell his son when he grows up what time his father died, reflecting his own father's death. She refuses, telling him that his son will never even know his name. Pedro, one of the rebels and her brother, draws his weapon and shoots Vidal, killing him. Thank God - he was a psycho.
The maid comes into the labyrinth looking for Ofelia, and finds her dying. As the maid hums her a lullaby, drops of Ofelia's blood drips onto the altar which was the gateway into the underworld. Ofelia seems to hallicunate, and finds herself in a grand hall in fancy clothes, where atop two of three tall altars are her mother and father. The faun is there with his fairy pets flying around him (including the ones previously eaten by the monster). She learns that by giving up the eternal life as the princess to save her baby brother, she has completed the final task and proven herself to be the Princess Moanna. The scene changes back to the one where she is dying - Ofelia smiles, and then she passes on. And the movie ends.
I might mention at this point that the lullaby the maid is humming is seriously freaky - it's part of the soundtrack as well, going along with music, but before I even saw the movie that little tune gave me the creeps.
Go rent it. It's awesome :D