Source: The Conversation – UK
This autumn marks the 20th anniversary of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro’s elaborate and deeply sorrowful film about a young girl caught between two dangerous worlds in rural Spain in 1944.
The film tells the story of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who finds herself shifting between the “real” above-ground world half a decade after the end of the Spanish civil war, and an underground “fantasy” realm where ancient forces recognise her as a lost princess.
It is a perennially relevant tale of tyrannical power and those who rebel against it. Highly lauded on its release, the film’s stature has grown in the last two decades. It appears in prestigious international polls of the greatest films of the 21st century, and many view it as the pinnacle of del Toro’s body of work to date.
One reason the film resonates with audiences and critics alike is its compelling, dense visual language. This abundance of symbolic images draws on del Toro’s impressive capacity to use grandiose mythic signs infused with pop-cultural emblems.
The iconic Pale Man (Doug Jones), for example, is an amalgam of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son and a poster for Don Coscarelli’s 1979 horror film Phantasm.
Ofelia’s liminal existence is reflected through contrasting visuals. We see her placed in the hands of her stepfather, the despotic Falangist Captain Vidal (Sergi López), draped in the bland greyness of militarism, and watch as she is mesmerised by the mysterious Faun (also played by Doug Jones), who blends with this bizarre and beautiful underworld.
Ofelia, who speaks rarely during the film, aptly, defying the subservience the verbose Vidal demands. Instead, she reads and responds to the world through visual symbols that give meaning to the horrific ongoing violence of Franco’s regime above ground, and the tempting-yet-terrifying netherworld below.
The Faun gives Ofelia a seemingly empty book that magically fills with images and text as her quests continue. In the film’s logic, the power of creation and alchemical image-making gives her a sense of self, direction and purpose in the labyrinthine environment.
Cinema’s resilience under censorship
Censorship, and the rebellious ways art can respond to it through potent symbolism, are central to the film. In 1938, the Comisión Nacional de Cinematografía was added to Spain’s already harsh legislative controls over film exhibition. This added film fiction as a category to be controlled alongside newsreels and documentaries, tacitly recognising cinema as a provocative art form.
Film-makers were both required and well equipped to use the suggestive power of symbolism, deeply embedded in Hispanic culture and heritage (evident in the visual language of pictorial art, religion and folklore) to address the trauma of the civil war and life under Franco.
For example, in Carlos Saura’s 1966 The Hunt, three middle-aged civil war veterans reunite to lead a small hunting party searching for rabbits in the location where they once trapped and shot down loyalists. Their nostalgic hunting trip and fond reminiscences turn to bitterness and eventually violence against one another, suggesting that the horrors of their past have caught up with them in implicit, rather than explicit terms.
In Pan’s Labyrinth, the most horrific actions take place not in the mysterious underworld, full of monsters, mysteries and terrors, but in the real world above, where Captain Vidal wreaks the bizarre blend of maniacal violence and controlled intent that is the festering hallmark of fascism.
A tragic scene sees a father and son interrogated after they have been found with a gun. They swear that the father has been hunting rabbits to feed their family. Vidal brutally batters the son to death with a bottle and shoots the father in the throat before casually searching through his satchel only to find several rabbits, which makes no difference whatsoever to him.
Pan’s Labyrinth also incorporates magical-realist films made under censorious conditions. The most prominent of these is Víctor Erice’s 1973 The Spirit of the Beehive. Set in a Castilian village in 1940, the film follows Ana (Ana Torrent), a young girl whose life is transformed after James Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein comes through town via a mobile cinema.
Captivated by the film’s power, Ana’s reality shifts, and she helps a wounded Republican soldier, seeing his plight as mirroring that of the abandoned creature. The film’s tribute to the power of cinema and symbolism has had a deeply formative effect on del Toro and, of course, influenced his recently fulfilled dream of adapting his own version of Frankenstein in 2025.
Del Toro has stated that he is “not a filmmaker who can speak directly about politics without addressing it through fable or parable. It’s just not in my make-up.” Pan’s Labyrinth can be seen not only as a film that draws on a vast pantheon of symbolically coded imagery, but also as one that pays homage to cinema’s resilience under censorship, confirming the indefatigability of the human imagination.
Keith McDonald works for York St John University
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/29/pans-labyrinth-at-20-a-powerful-symbolic-tribute-to-spanish-resilience-in-the-face-of-fascism/