The faun fits neatly into Ofelia's worries about her pregnant mother he gives her a mandrake root to hide under the mother's bed and feed with two drops of blood daily. The faun seems to be both good and evil what are we to make of a huge pile of used shoes, especially worrisome in the time of the Holocaust? But what he actually offers is not good or evil, but the choice between them, and Del Toro says in a commentary that Ofelia is "a girl who needs to disobey anything except her own soul." The whole movie, he says, is about choices. Some viewers have confused the faun with Pan, but there is no Pan in the picture and the international title translates as "Labyrinth of the Faun." The insect, friendly and insistent, seems to her like a fairy, and when she says so, the bug becomes a vibrating little man who leads her into a labyrinth and thus to her first fearsome meeting with the faun ( Doug Jones, who specializes in acting inside bizarre costumes). It shudders in and out of frame, and we're reminded of Del Toro's affection for odd little creatures (as in " Cronos," with its deep-biting immortality bug). Ofelia encounters a strange insect looking like a praying mantis. He orders Mercedes ( Maribel Verdu), his chief servant, to cook the rabbits for dinner: "Maybe a stew." What a vile man. "Next time, search these assholes before wasting my time with them," he tells an underling.
After they die, Vidal finds rabbits in their pouches. Soon after arriving, Vidal shoots dead two farmers whose rifles, they claim, are only for hunting rabbits. The girl hates her stepfather, who indeed values Carmen only for breeding purposes. A troop of Franco's soldiers is sent to the remote district to hunt down the rebels, and is led by Capitan Vidal ( Sergi Lopez), a sadist under cover as a rigid military man.Ĭommandeering a gloomy old mill as his headquarters, he moves in his new wife, Carmen ( Ariadna Gil), who is very pregnant, and her daughter from her first marriage, Ofelia ( Ivana Baquero). Bands of anti-Franco fighters hide in the forest, encouraged by news of the Normandy landings and other setbacks for Franco's friends Hitler and Mussolini.
He also rejected all the hackneyed ideas for the creatures of movie fantasy and created (with his Oscar-winning cinematographer, art director and makeup people) a faun, a frog and a horrible Pale Man whose skin hangs in folds from his unwholesome body. The Mexican director responded strongly to the horror lurking under the surface of classic fairy tales and had no interest in making a children's film, but instead a film that looked horror straight in the eye. "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006) took shape in the imagination of Guillermo del Toro as long ago as 1993, when he began to sketch ideas and images in the notebooks he always carries.