Running time: 119 mins . . . . .

ALL CINEMA is illusion, but since its origins at the end of the 19th century it has been split between those who sought to use its magic to confront reality with realism and those who saw it as an invitation to give escape into fantasy. The Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro achieves an extraordinary merging of the two seemingly contradictory approaches in Pan's Labyrinth. It's set in the mountains of northern Spain where, several years after the dictator Franco's brutal triumph in the 1936-39 civil war, a group of Republican resistance fighters are still holding out in the hope that the imminent victory of the Allies would bring belated support.

A frightened little girl (11-yearold Ivana Baquero), whose widowed mother (Ariadna Gil) is married to a ruthless fascist captain (Sergi Lopez) who, with his soldiers, is intent on exterminating all opposition, tries to shut out what is happening around her by reading fairy stories. They prompt her to imagine that an ancient labyrinth she discovers in the woods is the entrance to an underworld ruled over by a giant faun-like figure where she was once a princess.

She seeks to escape the real-life monster that is her stepfather . . .

who treats her pregnant mother with macho contempt, instructing a doctor that, if there's a choice between saving her life or the baby's, to save the baby, his male heir . . . by confronting fantastical monsters, a belching frog, a faceless man with eyes in the palms of his hands, that seek to deny her a chance of immortality.

Del Toro somehow manages to bring the two inter-cutting stories . . . the real and the imagined . . . together in a shattering denouement that makes gut-wrenching sense.

Pan's Labyrinth resembles his earlier movie The Devil's Backbone which also dealt with fascism in the aftermath of the civil war through the eyes of children, a device often employed by writers and film-makers . . . most notably Victor Erice in The Spirit of the Beehive . . . to evade censorship during the Franco dictatorship.

During Spain's 40 years of fascist rule, the church, the army and the state defined all truth. Anything that failed to conform to their version of reality was denounced as communist subversion.

Children went through school and university without ever hearing of Lorca or the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Playwrights like Antonio Buero Vallejo . . . jailed for several years . . . and film-makers like Carlos Saura turned to allegory to tell stories, so that a play set in a blind asylum was seen by audiences as a metaphor for Spain.

Pan's Labyrinth is a homage to this daring tradition, with the labyrinth . . . brilliantly visualised in the manner of the great Victorian illustrator Arthur Rackman . . . as a metaphor for Spain as a country and its transit to where it is now. Yet within this framework, the reality of the captain is a chilling reminder of the way fascism consumed much of Spain. Sergi Lopez brilliantly conveys the cold-blooded selfrighteous arrogance of the man with his meticulous obsession with time and order, shaving to the melody of classical music and entertaining fawning local officials and their simpering wives to dinner, while in almost the same breath subjecting prisoners to sadistic torture and summary execution.

He represents all that was rotten in Spain until 1975 . . . and I've argued into the night with a bully like him, sitting opposite me in his shirt-sleeves, his gunbelt menacingly on the table, calmly saying that he wouldn't hesitate to shoot his wife if given the order . . . and has since manifested itself elsewhere, in Chile under Pinochet and Argentina under the colonels, and more recently in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and now under the Bush-imposed regime.

Pan's Labyrinth is at once an adult fairy story, an indictment of fascism and a cautionary parable, a work of hypnotic power, weird beauty and stirring humanity.