WATCH PARTY: Pan's Labyrinth (2006) dir. Guillermo del Toro @Richard Tucker Lib

If this movie doesn't make you cry, you have no soul. 😂 (h.t. cinephile Charles) From the director of The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, and the upcoming Frankenstein (2025).

RUNTIME: 119 minutes

SYNOPSIS (via Criterion): An Academy Award–winning dark fable set five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth encapsulates the rich visual style and genre-defying craft of Guillermo del Toro. Eleven-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero, in a mature and tender performance) comes face to face with the horrors of fascism when she and her pregnant mother are uprooted to the countryside, where her new stepfather (Sergi López), a sadistic captain in General Francisco Franco’s army, hunts down Republican guerrillas refusing to give up the fight. The violent reality in which Ofelia lives merges seamlessly with her fantastical interior world when she meets a faun in a decaying labyrinth and is set on a strange, mythic journey that is at once terrifying and beautiful. In his revisiting of this bloody period in Spanish history, del Toro creates a vivid depiction of the monstrosities of war infiltrating a child’s imagination and threatening the innocence of youth.

BLURBS:

"The brilliance of 'Pan’s Labyrinth' is that its current of imaginative energy runs both ways. If this is magic realism, it is also the work of a real magician." - A.O. Scott, The New York Times

"Guillermo del Toro has crafted a masterpiece, a terrifying, visually wondrous fairy tale for adults that blends fantasy and gloomy drama into one of the most magical films to come along in years." - David Germain, Associated Press

"So breathtaking in its artistic ambition, so technically accomplished, so morally expansive, so fully realized that it defies the usual critical blather. See it, and celebrate that rare occasion when a director has the audacity to commit cinema." - Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post