A long, long time ago, in an underground kingdom a young princess, wanting the light of the sun, escaped from her home and made her way up to the surface, where, in that sunlight, she became human, grew old (as was not the way of her people) and died. But her father the king, sure that she would eventually return, though perhaps in some other guise, opened a series of portals around the world through which she would be able, perhaps with some help, to find her way back.

Cut to Spain of the year 1944, where, under the Fascist but militarily neutral dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a few leftovers from the Republican forces of the Spanish Civil War still fight a rearguard guerilla action back in the mountains, hoping (in vain, as it would turn out) that when the democracies, who have just breached the walls of northwestern Europe at Normandy, have finished with Hitler and Mussolini they will turn their attention to Franco and restore the Republican government. One of Franco’s minions, the ideologically trustworthy, amoral, sometimes vicious and sadistic Capitán Vidal (Sergi López), is stationed at an old mill near a prehistoric stone labyrinth and tasked with rooting out one such guerilla band. Vidal has recently married a young widow, Carmen (Ariadna Gil) and she is now being brought to the mill along with her daughter by her previous marriage Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her unborn son; Vidal, who suffers from a raft of psychological problems relating to his father, who was a General in Morocco, is more interested in having his son born in his presence than in having his wife present.

En route to the mill, Carmen suffers a bout of nausea, which forces the convoy escorting her to stop for a few minutes, during which the young Ofelia, who reads books of fairy tales and dreams of fantasies, to wander away from the cars, where she finds a strange looking stone on the track and, just off the track, an overgrown monolith engraved with the picture of what might be an ancient deity, missing one eye that the stone she has found just seems to fit; and here she also meets a strange-looking bug, something like an overgrown mantis, which ultimately follows her to the mill, morphs into a fairy, and leads her through the labyrinth to the central well, where she meets a faun (Doug Jones) who will give her three tasks to do …

This is probably the premiere fantasy of 2006-2007, in my opinion, and perhaps of others; surprisingly for a foreign-language film (Spanish, with English subtitles) I found it showing not only at a Berkeley cinema that shows such “artistic” films but also at our local cineplex, along with the usual batch of pop films. There are two parallel stories, one pure-dee political (Vidal’s war against the guerillas) and the other purely fantasy (Ofelia’s relationship with the faun and her magic-assisted attempts to carry out her three tasks and find her way home). The two stories, in fact, are not totally decoupled, and lead to a final contrast between the failure of Vidal’s belief that the innocent exist for him and for Franco to exploit and the success of Ofelia’s recognition that a ruler exists for the people, whatever the price he or she must pay in the end. (Something similar can be seen in the conclusion of The Queen.)

I have no problem considering this perhaps one of the best films of 2006 — and not just because del Toro’s production company called itself “Esperanto filmoj”.