Pan's Labyrinth

Spain, 1944. Ofelia and her ailing mother Carmen travel to a remote mountain outpost where Carmen's new husband, Captain Vidal, is hunting the last Republican rebels. Vidal is meticulous, cold, and casually brutal. The outpost is not a home. It is a place people are brought to die.

Ofelia discovers an ancient labyrinth on the grounds and follows it to its center, where she meets a faun — ancient, unsettling, not entirely trustworthy. He tells her she is Princess Moanna, heir to an underground kingdom, and that to reclaim her birthright she must complete three tasks before the full moon.

The tasks escalate in danger. The first sends her beneath a dying fig tree to retrieve a key from a bloated, ancient toad. The second takes her to a banquet table in a sealed room, where the Pale Man sits motionless at the head — a creature with no eyes in its head, only hands, and a particular appetite. Ofelia disobeys the Faun's instructions and eats two grapes. The Pale Man wakes.

In the real world, Vidal is closing in on the rebels. His housekeeper Mercedes is secretly feeding information to her brother among them. Carmen's pregnancy is going badly. The two worlds press against each other — the magic thinning, the violence thickening.

For the third task, the Faun demands Ofelia bring her newborn brother to the labyrinth as the final key. She refuses to let a drop of his blood be spilled. Vidal follows her, shoots her, and takes the child. The rebels arrive. Mercedes kills Vidal.

Ofelia dies at the center of the labyrinth, her own blood soaking into the stone. The portal opens. Whether what follows is real or the dying dream of a girl who needed it to be — the film doesn't say.