Pan's Labyrinth

[pen_grunt]

This weekend, I had my first moment EVER of being in genuine danger of vomiting due to visual stimuli. I have a pretty strong stomach, and can watch a fair number of things while being disgusted, but not physically ill. Pan's Labyrinth, however, is an exception.


My sister came downstairs after we were done watching the movie and asked, isn't that a kid's movie? Despite the appearance of a fantasy film and the story centering around a child, Pan's Labyrinth is definitely NOT a kid's movie. In fact, I would question the parents that let their young child watch that.

Wait, take that back. My parents probably would have let me watch that after feeding me a steady diet of Silence of the Lambs and Gremlins (they weren't very attentive about movie ratings).

The movie is fantastic. It's wonderful. It's spooky and horrifying and fantastic and fantastical all at the same time. It's slightly poetic and very grim.

It also has the scene where, after watching, Derrick and I both had to pause the movie for a bit to gather ourselves....after repeating, "Ohmygodohmygodohmygod" and watching through our splayed fingers:

The evil stepfather character is a Captain in the Spanish Civil War. He really hates the resistance movement. Consequently when he catches a farmer hunting rabbits in the back field and suspects him of being a resistance person, he's none too happy. The farmer's son tries to explain the situation--hunting for food. The Captain, being a Very Evil Person (in that way that is genuinely terrifying, not superficially terrifying) cracks him across the head with a glass wine bottle. He then proceeds to SMASH HIS FACE IN with the wine bottle. Blow after blow strikes, and yet the camera does not move away. You just have to look at it. And keep looking at it.

After this, he shoots the farmer and the the son with no face. Sickening. They later find the rabbits that the farmer shot and confirm that he was, in fact, innocent of any resistance movement.

There are also things like: The sawing off of a leg, the cutting open of a cheek (a la Chinatown and the nose) and the sewing of skin, the torture of people, the burning of a magical thing, and the biting heads off of faeries (though not by the Captain).

It's not even MEANT to be a horror movie, yet it is so much more horrifying than the violence-for-violence's sake of movies like Saw or Hostile (neither of which I like). I've watched things that have chilled me before (Schindler's List comes to mind, and the "Why we're fighting" portion of Band of Brothers) but somehow, while that was shocking in a slow-building way, this was more abrupt and menacing. Fact vs. fiction, I suppose.



Anyway, I loved the movie, but I did have to shut my eyes several times...and there was much chanting, "Ohmygodohmygodohmygod...no no no no".

Comments

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

Pity, that. Because the movie, as a whole, while disturbing and horrifying on a level, is also rather wonderful--and well worth watching.

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

You should probably never see Irreversible.

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

But, but...it looks interesting...

Which means that I now MUST see it.

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's an astonishingly good film. But it uses an extremely graphic guy-getting-his-head-smashed-by-a-fire-extinguisher scene to deaden your emotions enough to allow you to get through the 11 minute rape scene. It's entirely unpornographic and entirely obscene at the same time. I just barely made it through, which puts me in a category with just about 50% of everybody who's tried. If the movie wasn't so amazingly wonderful, it'd be akin to a snuff film, but the payoff is worth the struggle.

[irishinmn.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a typical night at a hennepin ave bus stop ....

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

Oh come now, I've been on plenty of places along Hennepin after dark (I did used to live in NE Minneapolis, after all)...and thus far I've never seen anyone get beaten to death by having their face smashed in with a wine bottle.

[liquid-siftings.livejournal.com]

You're right, there's something so palpable about the violence in the film. It's so matter-of-fact in presentation. I really liked the movie.

Another good, but difficult-to-watch because of the violence movie is The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

I think the thing that made the movie particularly enjoyable despite the violence was that every piece or incidence of violence was purposeful. There was no gratuitous gore--everything served a purpose in furthering the story or building a character. That's really rare in a movie.

[floydcollins.livejournal.com]

It's not meant to be a horror movie? Del Toro is a horror director (Hellboy, et al.)

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure I--personally--would classify Hellboy or even Devil's Backbone as horror movies, either. The thing about Pan's Labyrinth is that it certainly doesn't feel like a horror movie, despite said violence/gore. Certainly not in the sense of conventional "horror" or scary movies, maybe more so in the sense of "that's horrific".

Watching the trailers after the movie, it was also marketed as sort of a dark fantasy--a la Labyrinth or Dark Crystal.

Maybe it was meant to be a horror movie...it certainly fulfilled a quota of gore (though, again, in a more purposeful way than I'm used to seeing in the horror genre). Then again, it just didn't FEEL like a horror movie for all that.

[lisa-e-is-me.livejournal.com]

Oh, I loved "Pan's Labyrinth", and "Devil's Backbone", too!!! Yeah, the violence in "P.L." really caught us off-guard, as well. I had recommended the movie to my dad, but warned him (mostly so he could warn his wife) that there were some extremely violent parts. After he watched, he actually asked me which parts I meant when I said it was violent. I was all, "WHAT?!?!?! Are you kidding me? The guy whose face was smashed in with the bottle - that wasn't one of the most horrible things you've ever seen?" and he said during that part the scene was so dark he couldn't really tell what was happening in detail. I told him that for once, he was lucky his t.v. was kind of crappy. We had watched in in Hi-Def, and I remember curling up into a very tight ball during that part, but I was unable to look away. The rest of the violence was certainly strong, but compared the bottle, it hardly made me flinch. I thought the movie was beautifully done, and the creatures were completely fascinating.