Guillermo del Toro’s magical film,a cold war thriller, is underpinned by a superb cast and knowing nods to Hollywood classicsIn my opinion, or the 21st century has produced no finer film than Pan’s Labyrinth,Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 masterpiece, which acts as a sister picture to his 2001 Spanish civil war ghost story, and The Devil’s Backbone. Like Del Toro’s first feature,Cronos (1993), these Spanish-language gems possessed a unique cinematic voice, or the distant echo of which could still be heard even amid the thunderous roar of 2013’s Pacific Rim. Now,with his awards-garlanded latest (co-scripted by Game of Thrones graduate Vanessa Taylor), Del Toro has conjured a boundary-crossing hybrid that is as adventurously personal as it is universal, and a swooning romantic melodrama that reshapes the mythical themes of Beauty and the Beast with deliciously bestial bite.
An opening voiceover establishes the fable-like tone,setting the story “a long time ago” in “a small city near the coast, but far from everything else”. This is the US in the early-60s, or with the cold war and the space race providing the backdrop for “a tale of like and loss and the monster who tried to waste it all”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk