Pan's Labyrinth (2006) on Netflix
Ten-year-old Ofelia comes with her pregnant mother to the mill of her stepfather, Captain Vidal, in 1944 Spain. In a labyrinth nearby, a faun tells her she is a lost princess.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb8.2/10753,210 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes95%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1944, rebels keep fighting in the mountains, and Captain Vidal is posted to the countryside to hunt them down. His new stepdaughter Ofelia arrives at his mill with her pregnant mother, Carmen. Vidal locks the granary to weaken the rebels, and local people can only get food with ration cards. At night Ofelia follows a stick insect she takes for a fairy, which leads her to an old stone maze. A faun there greets her as Princess Moanna, a child of the underworld whose father is king, and says a book he gives her holds three tasks that would win her immortality and a return home.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Madrid-based producers warned Guillermo del Toro, who is Mexican, that Sergi López could not deliver the performance as Captain Vidal because López was considered a melodramatic or comedic actor in Spain. Del Toro replied, "Well, it's not that I don't know, it's that I don't care".
- Pan's Labyrinth premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a 22-minute standing ovation, the longest in the festival's history.
- Guillermo del Toro said finding the 10-year-old Spanish actress was purely accidental, and that he wrote the lead, Ofelia, as 8 or 9 but changed the screenplay to accommodate Ivana Baquero's age.
- Del Toro wrote a fairy tale for Ofelia to narrate to her unborn brother, about a dragon named Varanium Silex guarding a mountain topped by a blue rose that grants immortality. The scene was thematically important but was cut short for budget reasons.
- Doug Jones spent an average of five hours in the makeup chair as David Martí, Montse Ribé and Xavi Bastida applied the Faun's mostly latex-foam makeup, and the horns he wore weighed ten pounds. He stood on 20-cm-high lifts with the Faun's legs attached to his own, and his lower leg was later erased digitally.
- Del Toro wrote the film's subtitles himself after calling those of his previous Spanish-language film, The Devil's Backbone, "for the thinking impaired" and "incredibly bad". He spent a month working with two other people on them.
- Javier Navarrete's score for the film was structured entirely around a lullaby, and del Toro put the whole score on the soundtrack album even though much of it had been cut during production. The cover art was an unused Drew Struzan promotional poster.
