Guillermo del Toro (Mexico, born 1964)

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

I wasn’t completely sure about Pan’s Labyrinth.

It concerns a young girl, Ofelia, living in a remote area of wartime Spain. She’s left to her own devices, and discovers a phantasmagorical underworld where she meets a small selection of otherworldly creatures, only one of which she talks to. To the extent that she knows there’s a war going on, she doesn’t seem to know the details and is essentially lost in her own world.

Just like actor Doug Jones, who plays both the relatively friendly Faun character and also the distinctly unfriendly Pale Man, I feel that this movie adopts different guises, and it works in every guise it inhabits. As an evocative period piece, it works. As a suspense piece, it works. As an examination of good and evil, it works. As an illustration of the pitfalls and wild uncertainty of childhood, it works. And ultimately (spoiler alert), as a tragedy, it works too.

The one thing Pan’s Labyrinth didn’t do was leave me with any particularly notable lasting impression. I don’t really wish to criticise a film which, from beginning to end, was absolutely fine, especially when these ‘guises’ that it simultaneously takes on should often, on paper, not work at all. The movie finds a way to make them work, and for that it should be commended. It was a risk to introduce fantasy elements into a film which also- albeit tangentially- depicts one of the most solemn and severe socio-historical events ever recorded (and still recent enough for living memory). Fittingly, this synthesis finds parallel in the movie’s melding of iridescent colour and profound shadow.

But I don’t really know what it all signifies or what the exact intent of this film ultimately was. As a piece of entertainment, I felt that it generally failed- perfectly acceptable as it all was, any enjoyment I experienced was mild at best. If I was supposed to find its closing scenes devastating, it also failed- I didn’t feel close enough to the plucky Ofelia for this to occur. She didn’t seem to have many overt traits, and those that were evident, such as curiosity, were underplayed; subsequently I thought it was a curiously blank performance from the young Ivana Baquero, though the language barrier may have had a hand in that. 

Why, then, did I earlier say that this tragic element of the film ‘works’? Well, because it does. It may not have left me inconsolable, but it is the right ending for this movie. It re-contextualises its fantasy and adventure elements and brings all of them crashing back to earth. This ending seems to represent the death of innocence, which I would guess extends to everyone, internationally, on whom the grim realities of National Socialism portentously dawned. But it also means that Ofelia will never lose her innocence, unless you count the few moments she has to similarly re-assess her entire view of the world, and see that it is far more cold and cruel than she thought it was; in this way, she also serves as a stand-in for all the other children who, for no reason, were never adults thanks to the deranged ideologies of vicious megalomaniacs.

Like The Secret in Their Eyes, this was a film that featured brutality designed to elicit horror without actually being a horror movie. It’s more restrained, more ambiguous, and also crosses far more genre lines than Campanella’s crime thriller. But the overall effect for me was very much the same. I thought it was OK without really having much of an opinion, and I was occasionally a little bored.

The Shape of Water (2017)

The Shape of Water concerns Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins, a mute woman who develops an infatuation with an amphibian-human hybrid housed in the loosely-defined secretive government building where she works as a cleaner.

Why?

Dunno. It doesn’t say. She just does.

Is it simply because the creature is non-verbal, and so is she? Is that ‘reason’ really good enough? And am I the only one who thinks it is potentially quite insulting to insinuate that mute people might prefer to form courtships with creatures rather than other humans, would find closer kinship with such creatures, and that this sort of thing would come very naturally and unquestioningly to them, should an opportunity present itself?

Elisa has a childlike disposition, a naïve purity in a corrupt world- again, theoretically quite patronising to those with mutism, in my view- and maybe this is supposed to explain away her actions somewhat. Or maybe it’s her loneliness which is the driving factor, as her only friends are a co-worker (Octavia Spencer) and a neighbour (Richard Hawkins), both saintly, and both fated to become entangled in her misadventures. In any event, the shower of acclaim that greeted this movie on release, along with the Best Picture Oscar, would suggest that yes, I am the odd one out when looking at the film with such circumspection, and something of a joyless grinch when the film’s opulent visuals and treacly character dynamics are clearly supposed to envelop me in a sense of pure enchantment.

I thought this film was rather more coherent than Pan’s Labyrinth, but maybe it was just more narratively and thematically straightforward. Either way, I found that it was very similar in terms of approach. Cinematography in both films was absolutely key, with incredibly lush colours that were almost too deep and too rich for their own good, while both films also applied ‘fable’ and ‘fairytale’ elements to otherwise recognisable and relatable settings.

Generally I found that the movie found moderate success in what I thought it was aiming for. Hawkins was good, Spencer was OK, and Jenkins in particular gave a standout, heartfelt performance that contained much more vulnerability and depth than was suggested from the entertaining supporting performances I had seen him give in Six Feet Under, The Cabin in the Woods and Hall Pass. Meanwhile, Michael Shannon, playing the baddie with his brand of profoundly eccentric, emotionally cold intensity and barely-controlled mania lying under veneers of forced calmness and innate superiority, provides an extremely close iteration of the performance he gave in Boardwalk Empire, which is fine, I suppose, if that’s what the director wanted.

I dunno. The creature isn’t harmless, he’s actually quite savage, though predictably, Elisa’s demure and delicate presence brings out the gentle tenderness in our misunderstood brute. Nevertheless, freeing him from the compound is an objectively stupid decision, especially when no-one’s even keeping an eye on him and he’s allowed to escape from her apartment and wander into a local movie theatre- in a stroke of wildly unlikely blind luck, not a single member of the public catches sight of him during this episode and they are simply able to usher him back without incident. Another objectively stupid (and selfish) decision- deliberately flooding her fucking bathroom, almost all the way to the ceiling, in an apartment block filled with other tenants. Meanwhile, our resident villains, the aforementioned Michael Shannon along with a diner clerk played by Morgan Kelly, remind us who the real beasts are. We’re the real beasts. Us! Prejudice and ignorance are the real beasts! Get it? GET IT?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. It’s a point that might have been better made if the amphibian-man didn’t eat pets, or wasn’t perfectly capable of- and willing to- slash open a person’s throat with his bare claws.

The Shape of Water is not an unpleasant way to spend two hours, and I see no reason to pretend that it is. It’s fine, and some bits of it are actually pretty good. Unfortunately, I also found it to be shot through with pretension- a particular vibe and attitude which seemed to decree that the material was more meaningful, more convincing, more logical, and more affecting than it actually was. Ho hum.