Too much
Went to see Pan’s Labyrinth yesterday. Fantastic movie, but we just had to leave the cinema at some point (I went along, that is). A fantasy world’s horror mirrors the horrors of Spain in limbo between civil war and Franco’s dictatorship. A nightmarish monster, torture, euthanasia, murder, a creature being burned to death, death during childbirth – all in a few minutes, very graphic and with no break whatsoever in between.
Interesting to feel again the power of fiction and to see what happens when there’s no trace of comic relief in such kind of narrative – it just got too much. (Badly want to see how it ends, though)
Update: So we watched the end yesterday. Of course, we had left the cinema just before things changed a bit for the better, thus perfectly traumatizing ourselves. The ending is actually really smart, in a kind of biblical way. Resolution through self-sacrification, but in a way that leaves the question of what happened in the end (or possibly throughout the entire story) entirely to the audience. It elegantly creates a divide between story and history while at the same time joining them together even closer. I’d recommend you to watch it. Don’t take drugs before.
And: Guess who Doug Jones, who plays the Pale Man, is as well:
I wish I could say I’ve known it all along.