Is it even 'real' and 'fantasy'? I was talking with a friend about this and said I thought it was magical realism more than straight fantasy. He (and he's kind of an expert-y type on this stuff) argued that MR is fantasy, which is true ...
But anyway, I don't think any of the fantasy part was ambiguous at all, except for the faun and the fairies. Their interactions with Ofelia are not ambiguous to anyone unused to the corpus of lit on fairy/faery interaction, but to someone who reads a lot of fantasy and myth, all of the "knowledge" we have about fairies makes it ambiguous. OTOH, while we are naturally going to see the Captain (Colonel?) as BAD (how can we not? History is on the filmmaker's side), I think it's clear that he is a true believer. He's very complex, and I think there's as much of his being a little man faced with living up to his family's reputation of honourable service as anything else. I admit, it gets iffy in the scenes I won't spoil, but even then, I never got the feeling he enjoyed any part of his cruelty except that it made him feel he was superior and reinforced his beliefs that he was on the side of Right.
Can't say more, because, well, spoilers. And I thought some of the violence bordered on gratuitous.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
But anyway, I don't think any of the fantasy part was ambiguous at all, except for the faun and the fairies. Their interactions with Ofelia are not ambiguous to anyone unused to the corpus of lit on fairy/faery interaction, but to someone who reads a lot of fantasy and myth, all of the "knowledge" we have about fairies makes it ambiguous. OTOH, while we are naturally going to see the Captain (Colonel?) as BAD (how can we not? History is on the filmmaker's side), I think it's clear that he is a true believer. He's very complex, and I think there's as much of his being a little man faced with living up to his family's reputation of honourable service as anything else. I admit, it gets iffy in the scenes I won't spoil, but even then, I never got the feeling he enjoyed any part of his cruelty except that it made him feel he was superior and reinforced his beliefs that he was on the side of Right.
Can't say more, because, well, spoilers. And I thought some of the violence bordered on gratuitous.