Pan's Labyrinth (2006) is one of the best instances I've seen of ambiguity changing the meaning of a movie

Pan's Labyrinth is one of my all time favorite movies, and one of the most interesting things about it for me is that it can be seen in two completely different ways: a modern day dark fairy tale about a princess who must escape the horrors of our world to return to her own, or... a coping mechanism that a young girl uses to escape unbearable trauma.

I've seen ambiguity in lots of movies before, but this is one of my favorites because it shifts the tone, the themes, and practically everything else about the movie. There are several pieces of evidence for both sides of the "Is the fantasy stuff real?" debate. The main arguments I've seen for "real" are that Ofelia was able to escape her locked room using the chalk to create a doorway and that the root under her mom's bed actually seemed to help her mom. On the other side, some of the fantasy elements just line up too well with Ofelia's troubles, and at the end the Captain can't see the Faun.

To me, this movie is far more interesting without an answer than it would be if it actually gave one. I love to believe that Ofelia went off with her true parents and lived happily ever after in a magic kingdom, but I also realize that that could just be Del Toro pulling me into the coping mechanism with Ofelia, because I grow to care about her so much over the course of the movie and I want to see her get a happy ending.

So I'm curious to know, how do you see it? Do you find it more interesting one way or another, or are you somewhere in between like me? Either way it's interpreted, it's still an amazing, hauntingly beautiful film, and I'll never be able to get that lullaby out of my head.

Submitted April 04, 2021 at 04:47AM by LosCodos https://ift.tt/31JmCLx