Who talks in riddles, who talks in reasons?

I saw this film last night with romauld, dennyd and blanche_carte. It wasn't quite what I'd been expecting.

From the promotional materials, I was expecting something along the lines of Brothers Grimm. From wildeabandon's and duranorak's comments I knew it was nasty; specifically that there was one monster who was utterly horrible, creepy and disturbing. Nasty monsters: I envisaged something like a more adult version of The Dark Crystal. "Are they arachnid?" I asked Elise, and she said no, so I wasn't dreading it that much.

Possibly the warnings immuned me slightly, because I didn't find the Pale Man that bad at the time. Creepy, sure. Fascinating. Horrible. Worse when I thought the twin points in his face were close-set, low, empty eyes. As soon as his hands came up to his face and they were revealed to be nostrils, he became less horrible. But in his stillness, with the engravings on the walls, with his bloody, pointed, fingernail-less hands, he was pretty creepy. I couldn't take my eyes off him whenever he was in shot. But not that bad. Not the creepiest or most disturbing thing ever. Real things are worse. Of course, at 4am last night, when I was woken by the cat and a gale was blowing outside, I couldn't get the image of him out of my head, but at the time? I'm not sure he was even the nastiest thing in that film.

It was incredibly well done; the fantastic elements were handled perfectly, plausible and incomprehensible and foreboding. Real folk magick, involving real blood, that works for bad as for good, especially by those who don't recognise or understand it. Fairies that are more like locusts, clicking and chittering over floorboards. Stones with open mouths. Neither the mythical nor the historical storyline held back; it was vivid, bloody, human. The characters were sensitively portrayed, their motives realistic; everything played out exactly as you felt (and hoped, and feared) it should. Pan was brilliant - hard to visually comprehend, to hold in your head. The lasting impression of him was not physical features so much as a taste of earth, a rough dark voice, curled horns, those green-lit, slanted inhuman eyes.

It is a beautiful film. A genuine fairytale, dark and profound, the mythical and the real interweaving, each symbolising the other until they cannot be separated. At first the mirroring is standard: the Princess separated from her father, the adventures in a strange kingdom. But as the horror of her tasks and of her mortal situation increases, the interconnections become more vivid. The conflict with the toad in the dying tree mirrors the guerillas fighting for survival in the woods; the key held beneath the tree and Mercedes' copy of the key to the storeroom, which she uses to help the raiding party. The untouchable feast of the Pale Man mirrors' Vidal's banquet, which Ofelia is absent from, and which the local villagers are not allowed near, restricted to one too-small ration card each while the Captain gorges himself in private. (Ofelia eating the grapes was the only bit of the film I found implausible, actually; at the time I thought she might be under the Pale Man's spell, but from her conversation with Pan it appeared not). The Pale Man is Vidal, child-obsessed and child-killing, the monster with a long silver knife. The Pale Man sees through his bloody-fingered hands, and Vidal shoots before looking too closely. Gun in his palm; hands bloody from torturing the captured rebel. The mandrake root becomes the birth of Ofelia's brother, connected by sympathetic magic and by blood; the death of the root becomes the child's birth even as the mother dies. And in the last trial, Vidal is the monster to be overcome. Fantasy and myth are no longer separate; they are linked by the moment of Ofelia's death.

Carmen says to Ofelia "life isn't like your fairytales", and this is the central question of the film. Both worlds are horrible, scary, bloody. As real life grows ever darker and more hopeless, the kingdom Pan offers to Ofelia becomes more and more a source of hope, of escape. But the end creates a disorienting reversal; the myth fails her, her escape from the world of mortals is only death - and in the real world, the guerillas have prevailed, the monster has been killed, hope is finally rising.

The tasks she's set embody an increasing horror - the bloated, cockroach-eating toad that turns itself inside out, the horrific Pale Man - but in the end, real life is worse. She can escape from the Pale Man in the nick of time, despite disobeying the warnings. But in the end, she cannot escape from Vidal. Except by dying, and her escape from mortality opens more questions than it answers; has she escaped, or is she only dead? Was all the magic she experienced simply the processing of horrific events by a traumatised imagination? Or were they real? In the end, was she redeemed, or was it too late, is she only dead? After the second task Pan said to her that if she failed the tasks, she would stay a mortal, and would never be able to return to her father's kingdom: she would live a human and die a human. Given that, it doesn't seem - despite our hope - that dying could ever be the route to the kingdom. Yet the reciprocity of myth and history, each allegorising the other, opens up the ending as a question: mortality or immortality, tragedy or triumph? Does the romance of the last great sacrifice prevail, or is it another senseless loss in a dark and bloody war? At the end, the human survivors are the only reality we can truly believe in.