This movie is way too depressing. It's like a double-whammy. Crappy movie. Crappy subject matter. At least if a film is about picking flowers there's the possibility of deriving some joy from thinking about picking flowers even during the crappy movie. However, when you're telling a story about a young girl's misery in 1944 fascist Spain, there's pretty much no escape.

This also seems very similar to one of Del Toro's other films, "The Devil's Backbone," which is about some horror, also in a historical context, experienced by children and how they cope. The fantasy element in that film is replaced by a ghost element in this one, but they're very similar. Why deal with the same theme twice? If you weren't good enough to do it right the first time, move onto something else.

Ofelia's (Ivana Baquero) pregnant mom, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), carts her off to Captain Vidal's (Sergi Lopez) camp so she and the Captain can get married. Echoing nearly every other movie in which a young girl is carted off to get to know a father figure she's never met, the Captain turns out to be a dick and the most brutal of soldiers. He doesn't seem particularly mean to Carmen or Ofelia, but it becomes clear that human life means nothing to him and that killing comes as naturally as breathing. When Carmen takes sick, Ofelia's life becomes intolerable and she becomes embroiled in a rich fantasy life in which she is a princess and is given tasks to perform by a creature called Pan (Doug Jones) who looks like something kicked off the "Chronicles of Narnia" set.

Maybe I didn't have much of an imagination as a child, but even in my darkest moments, I don't remember drifting off into some fantasyland as a way to deal with the misery going on around me. The explanation seems to be that Ofelia reads a lot, so she has the background to do this. I say bull.

"Pan's Labyrinth" is a maze of problems.