If you’ve seen and loved Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro brings you on another trip into the fantastic, the edge between what is possible and what is not. Reality and imagination – in a way that American’s haven’t really been able to portray in film. It doesn’t seem to be “the way”.
My appreciation of Magical Realism was born out of Gabriel Garcia’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, down the rabbit hole of imagery, that small place where your senses might lie to you.
del Toro takes you on a journey of an orphan, who adopts an orphan… then upon returning to her orphanage, perhaps to give back some of the care she received as an orphan herself. But winds up learning terrible truths about events that took place before she could understand them. The Orphanage itself becomes both her obsession and her prison, love for her son leads her on a chase that will change the way she looks at life, death, and the afterlife.
The film itself leaves clues as to the conclusion – as the children have left clues as to truths of their lives and deaths.
Is it possible to be touched and freaked out by the same movie? The truth unravels slowly, like pulling on the thread of crochet… and the finish is filled with love – the sweet and the sour, life and death, both vibrant, as real as the sun and the sea.
It seems that del Toro has a beautiful way of connecting life and death, making the vision whole and fluid, like waves, beating the shore, like the tide, marching in and marching out – like the rhythm of the world, in constant motion.
Edit: Side note – the DVD menu-ing system is awesome. Visuals cycle, but the sound does not. I approve!
I loved that movie. The best part was that nothing “scary” (according to mainstream horror) happened but I was shitting myself for the entire film. The director was is a master of suspense.
@apsheko – Thanks for commenting! Have you seen other del Toro works? Particularly Pan’s Labyrinth?