review Pan's Labrynth

The overwhelming impression at the end is that it was written for someone. "For those who know where to look there are still signs of her". He can still see the signs of that someone and the remark must have been self-referential because he never showed us a way to look for her in our world.

Pan’s labyrinth... it’s called a fairy tale for adults

The question is: why this mixture of innocence and purity with the horrible and cruel? Why doesn’t the writer reconcile the two (which side can’t he understand and therefore portray them both as separate?).

The answer isn’t cruelty... it is the innocence he can’t deal with.

The innocence is what must become mythical while the cruelty is what he deals with in ‘reality’.

The story of the child isn’t the centre story but is given equal weight with the corresponding "real events". The child’s story is equal with the story of the captain but both their stories are really the stories of their loyalty to their fathers.

Ofileia remains true to her father and doesn’t address the captain as her father.

The captain too stays true to his father by disowning his father legacy and the watch (at the dinner table he denies the story).

Ofelia disobeys Pan and eats the fruit (and kills 2 fairies), it is not because of her purity that she is rewarded by seeing her father at the end. The writer doesn’t understand innocence. Ofelia is rewarded by her father by following the ‘law’ of not harming others (she won’t even spill a drop of her brother’s blood). However, this following of the law (of not harming others at all) makes her into the captain. As the Doctor says to the captain "only men like you can obey without questioning." Ofelia too obeys without question but in doing so she isn’t innocent or pure because these things don’t follow laws (in the end only cruelty does).

We don’t take the captain to be ‘evil’ once we find out that he is only following the laws of his father. He is only cruel. He only wanted to be like his father and when we see that he wanted to pass on his father’s watch to his son we know that he too endured much misery with his burden (but he didn’t know who he could be without it; this is the law of cruelty). His wish to have a son is the wish to see the debt-fulfilled and an admission it remains unfulfilled. (The captain kills the father and the son who were only out rabbit hunting on account of the son making excessive appeals of his father’s innocence; this is why the writer understands cruelty and not innocence).

If you pay attention the captain was never a part of Ofelia’s life. He was never cruel to her. She missed dinner and came back with a soiled dress but she wasn’t punished for it. The two stories never cross paths but each is the shadow of the other. The girl is the one who fulfills her father’s debt while the captain doesn’t. The captain is the one who had power while the girl was powerless in hers. Additionally, both mothers in the story are absent. We find out nothing of the captain’s mother and Ofelia’s mother is only the plaything of outside powers, with no will of her own. It is in the feminine that innocence and purity exists and this is more evidence the writer doesn’t understand it.

We finish the story with the death of the one father (because the captain’s child didn’t receive the watch) and the little girl returning to the side of her father who represent’s the law of God.
This fairy tale for adults is only a return to the Judaeo-Christian legacy. Though it is dressed up in the fur of paganism underneath is the cold inhuman law of the father.