But you don’t need a fairy tale to fashion a character like Vidal. “Only fairy tales give evil a proper shape,” the authors observe early on, as if to justify the barbarity to follow. He executes resistance fighters and a kindly doctor who dared to help them, despite the doctor being the only hope in saving Vidal’s ailing wife and unborn son. He tortures a young rebel with a hammer and pliers. He stabs out a boy’s eye with a broken bottle. Pain and suffering are definitely his thing.
Vidal is obsessed with death, his own and others’. She and her mother have been brought to an abandoned mill deep in the woods by her sadistic, sociopathic stepfather, a captain in Franco’s army named Vidal, whom Ofilia calls the Wolf, at least until nearly the end, when Funke and del Toro apparently decide a spider is a more apt metaphor. Set in fascist Spain in the darkest days of World War II, “Pan’s Labyrinth” stars 13-year-old Ofilia, a sensitive child who loves books, her mother, her dead father and her unborn half brother, in roughly that order.
The film’s writer and director, Guillermo del Toro, and a co-writer, Cornelia Funke (author of the Inkheart trilogy), remain faithful to the script, but I don’t recall this fabulistic story of a princess trying to return to her kingdom during a brutal war being so unremittingly dark, despite all the bloodshed and grotesque violence that saturated the tale. Unlike the brilliant 2006 movie upon which it is based, PAN’S LABYRINTH: The Labyrinth of the Faun (Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins, 256 pp., $19.99 ages 12 and up) screams both questions into the void.
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