Pan's Labyrinth is an absolute stunner. A beautiful and heartfelt, yet brutal and haunting fusion of pure fantasy and harsh reality that I won't soon forget. With this amazing effort, the brilliant Guillermo del Toro (Devil's Backbone, Cronos, Hellboy) has fashioned what is easily his strongest work to date.

Pan's Labyrinth takes place in Spain, 1944. After her loving father dies in the war, young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) has no choice but to move away with her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil). There destination, a military outpost in the country side, where mom is set to marry Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), the commander of a fascist regime.

As Ofelia tries to make the best of her new life, she can't shake the fear that dwells deep inside her soul. The fear that she might lose her mother, and the fear that she might be forced to live the rest of her days with this truly evil man.

To cope with this unpleasant new life she's been thrust into, Ofelia soon finds refuge in a rich and lurid fantasy world. A sort of parallel plane where talking fauns, fairies, and other odd entities go about living a very different life from her own. It is also a more hopeful place where dreams can come true. Ofelia proclaims this strange world (one that apparently only she can see) to be real, but her mother believes it to be mere figments of an imagination running wild due to the many stories books the young girl likes to read. "The world is a harsh place" the woman tells her daughter. Of course being the precocious child she is, Ofelia continues to visit her special place in hope that she might find a way to save her mother and unborn sibling from the horrors of the harsh world where she is bid to remain.

Pan's Labyrinth has elements of fantasy and brought to mind films like The Never-Ending Story, Labyrinth, Legend, Alice in Wonderland, and Spirited Away, still it also doles out a healthy dose of reality with unflinching brutality. In that regard, I was reminded of Steven Spielberg's Schlinder's List and Roberto Benigni's lighter but equally brutal Life is Beautiful. This is also a horror film at times, inspired by the likes of Clive Barker and H.P. Lovecraft. What's so miraculous about the movie, however, is that it can't really be considered a fantasy, a tragedy, or a horror film. It is, in fact, all of those and much more. I suppose at its heart, Pan's Labyrinth is a movie about the effects of repression, but it's splashed upon a broad canvas both broad and multi-layered. The effects are explored not only in a socio-political and psychological sense, but perhaps most interestingly it's effect on creativity.

Del Toro seamlessly weaves these various elements together and creates a breathtaking, uncompromising vision. Pan's Labyrinth is certainly dark, brooding, and tragic but it's also a thing of great, fragile beauty, and it would be near impossible to pigeon-hold it to one genre.

The performances are stunning. Young Ivana Baquero is wonderful as a young girl who must face the way the real world is by discovering truth in a unreal place. Doug Jones (Abe Sapien in Hellboy) is spellbinding as the mystical Pan and absolutely horrific as a creature called The Pale Man. Sergi Lopez is simply terrifying as a soul-less military man hell bent on creating a world in his light. Rounding out the impressive cast is the wonderful Maribel Verdu who appears as Mercedes, Vidal's fiercely intelligent servant. She develops a wonderful rapport with Ofelia, and that's one of the many things I so loved about this film.

I could gush about this movie for hours. I could go on and on about del Toro's passionate creative-process (del Toro has discussed at length with fans, that with most of his films, he'll write detailed notes and sketch potential character art for years prior to actually setting out to shoot a project–if memory serves, I believe he did this for seven years before making Pan's Labyrinth). Del Toro (like Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg) is one of those film makers who simply pours himself into every frame of a movie. It certainly shows in this film. Pan's Labyrinth is an absolute masterpiece, and for my money, it's the best picture of 2006. I can't wait to see it again.