In the early days of Frano's Spain, an adolescent girl, lost in a fantasy world of books (and indeed seeming to be actually living out her own fable) relocates with her mother to a wooded compound where her new sadistic army captain step-father is rooting out the few bands of remaining rebels. Meanwhile, she is visited by a mysterious faun and given three tasks to complete, tasks which will have tragic and otherworldly repercussions. Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is dumbly written and realized, clumsily welding together fairy tale and violent realism elements, and not nearly as imaginative as many give it credit for.
** out of ****
