I went to see this movie as one of the first things I did when one of my best friends got out of prison. I had read about this movie quite often nearly two years before it was released, in Rue Morgue and Fangoria magazines.
It's a fairy tale (for grown-ups, as the tv spots say) about Ofelia, and her magical adventures with a faun who tells her she is a princess and gives her three tasks to complete before she can be reunited with her royal parents.
In reality, however, she has a family, albeit a broken one. Her mother, with child, has fallen very ill, and her step-father, a military Captain of the Spanish Civil War, is hunting refugees from the other side, who hide in the forest surrounding the cabin to which he has brought Ofelia and her mother.
The film was anything but dull. It was extremely violent in a way Hollywood tries to avoid. And it was also brilliantly gorgeous, with amazing cinematography. The saddest part for me was the fact that it brought my own childhood fantasies to life, and made me long for them to come true, like I had then, and sometimes do now. I wanted it all to be real. And then BANG! the movie comes to a screeching halt that wraps it up phenomenally and quite sadly.
One thing I wanted in the end was the story Ofelia told about the lonely rose atop a dangerous mountain of death to make a second appearance, somehow giving her eternal life in her fantasy, which we will never know if she actually achieved.
Cinematography gets a 10/10. So does the story, characters (real and make-believe), and all that violence.
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