Upon its original release I was told it was the best film Guillermo del Toro had ever made. Having only seen Hellboy at that point and still aching from the disappointment, I didn’t doubt for a second the truthfulness of the tip so I went and watch it—but once again, not quite meeting any of the exhilaration anticipated. Coming back to it sixteen years later, after having distractedly let those negative impressions sediment for so long, the first thing I notice is how little I actually remembered of the story and, conversely, how vividly its imagery has been preserved in my mind. This observation alone is rather revealing as to the main graces of Pan’s Labyrinth, and as to what makes Guillermo del Toro such a unique storyteller. However mixed my feelings might be about his work, he remains one the very few—especially in an age that despite the amazing means offered by technology has only made mainstream films lighter and emptier—who’s still capable of creating characters and worlds that stay. An enchanter, and above all a daydreamer.
Giving shape to his own nightmares, del Toro conceives the film as a narrative maze in which reality gets lost and blurs into fantasy—where history meets mythology, human meets monster, darkness meets light. Pan is a reversed fairytale of lies, where solace can’t be found in this land but within its mysteries. Ofelia carries the complexity of a heroine who’s almost oblivious to what the real threats and stakes are, not just behind the walls or underneath the floors, but out there in the woods and even beyond, in the rest of the country. Less convincingly, her stepfather, brutal Francoist captain Vidal, slips into a stylisation often resorted to in cinema. By making a myth out of the sadistic autocrat, the disturbed man, the single-minded political and social climber, Pan reduces the troubled psychology under a sick regime to trivial terms, therefore missing at least one terrifying notion. People like Vidal don’t necessarily sport the mannerisms of a lunatic, a torturer, a monster. They are just like anyone else, men with families, men with friends, men and all.
It also took me an effort to buy the kitchy golden glow of the epilogue, but the profundity of its essence didn’t fail to touch me. From that depth, an unsound hollow, the echo of a cry deafened me—that of all the children who suffered from the inherent inhumanities of our recursive history. In that respect, Guillermo del Toro’s take is as down to earth as horns and hooves and fairies can be in the most beautiful stories.

There is a constant dialogue between form, style, and content that flows and grows throughout all Costa’s filmography. If with No Quarto da Vanda Costa had got rid of the narrative structure still vaguely present in Ossos, in Juventude em Marcha, third of what’s been called the Letters from Fontaínhas trilogy, he elevates the documentary nature to the lyrical stylisation that will keep on being explored through Cavalo Dinheiro and Vitalina Varela.
The estrangement of Pedro Costa’s characters in the architectural brutalism of the new district they have been relocated to, provides the intense emotional base on which Juventude em Marcha is built. I have seen Vanda as a teenager, then as a gaunt young woman addicted to heroin, now a mature lady with little to do except for . . . waiting, essentially. She is a survivor. And yet, seeing her, or Ventura, in what as a matter of fact is a better, healthier environment, doesn’t feel as reassuring as it should. I rather see a bunch of people removed from their roots, however rotten the ground they were in. And I see them lost, their future filled with a somehow emptier vacuum.
Striking are the shots where a seemingly aimless Ventura wanders through a maze of bright imposing blocks under a pitch black sky despite the blinding sun, or the the family portrait of a motherly Vanda and her daughter in a room that seems not theirs, and to some extent isn’t. ‘Mama just wants to raise you, then I can die . . . mama is sick . . . mama doesn’t think she can raise you,’ says Vanda to her little girl sitting on a bed that no matter how clean and neat, still looks like the same old dead end.