Fairy Tale and Film

Fairy Tale and Film
and repeatedly tells her boyfriend that looking after the girls is not her 
job, forfeits her former convictions, quitting the band when the girls 
are found, raising them alone when Luke is hospitalised, and battling 
the spectral presence that sees her as a rival. Mama, she discovers, 
is the unhappy spirit of a woman from the nineteenth century, who, 
when threatened with having her child taken from her, threw herself 
and her baby from a cliff. Her baby’s remains have been shelved all 
this time, denied a decent burial, and this separation of mother and 
child presumably prevents her spirit from resting. An effort is made to 
parallel this tragic past with a dysfunctional family in the present, the 
girls in the woods having been taken there by their deranged father, 
who killed his wife, abducted his young daughters and sought to kill 
them also before Mama stepped in. Ultimately, two women are engaged 
in a custody dispute, with Mama and Anabelle each staking a claim 
on the girls, culminating in a troubling compromise. Luke reappears, 
only to prove irrelevant once more as Mama knocks him out and takes 
the youngest girl, Lily, over the cliff to live with her in the afterlife. 
Annabelle manages to keep hold of Victoria and declares her love, her 
rejection of motherhood firmly repudiated, and the film ends with two 
reconstructed families, one alive, and the other dead. Although a pro-
tective spirit in many ways, Mama’s monstrosity is ultimately affirmed 
by her selfishness, willing to commit infanticide, yet again, rather than 
relinquish the girls she has taken custody of. When Annabelle reunites 
Mama with her baby’s remains, hoping she will find peace and release 
the girls, she responds by embracing and then dashing the bones to the 
ground. Opting to take Lily instead – and taking her life in the process – 
she thus proves herself a devouring mother to the end. Even as the 
young girl giggles delightedly at being reunited with the only mother 
she has ever known, and a moth suggests she will keep visiting her sister 
in this guise, it remains the case that a young girl has been murdered, 
and two sisters tragically separated, in an end that is hard to cheer. 
This feeling is in keeping with the finale of 
Pan’s Labyrinth
(Guillermo 
del Toro, 2006). Although much comment has been devoted to the con-
trasting worlds depicted in the film, questioning whether the fairy tale 
aspects are simply a product of its heroine’s imagination, equally perti-
nent is the fact that her family conflicts can only be resolved through 
death. A distant mother and a stern resentful stepfather prompt Ofelia 
(Ivana Baquero) to engage in some familiar coping strategies, construct-
ing a family romance in which she casts herself as a lost fairy princess, 
yet whether this fantasy family is preferable to her own is open to 
question. Has Ofelia truly forgotten her fairy identity, as the voice-over 

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states, or repressed unpleasant memories of her past? As the opening 
narration informs us, the fairy world is by no means idealised, with her 
former fairy ‘self’, Princess Moanna, longing to escape its darkness and 
evading her ‘keepers’ to do so, begging the question of why her father 
was so intent on keeping her captive. Hubner affirms that Ofelia’s great-
est attribute is her refusal to obey commands (2007: 6), which includes 
refusing to hand her newborn brother to the faun (Doug Jones) when 
told his blood is needed to open the labyrinth and allow her to return 
‘home’. Ultimately, her own blood enables this transition when she 
is killed by her stepfather, yet her sacrifice is troubling because of her 
extreme youth, as well as the uncertainty of any afterlife. Even a prepu-
bescent girl, it seems, must prove herself through maternal martyrdom, 
placing the life of an ‘innocent’ before her own, just as her mother did. 
Despite Ofelia’s disobedience, we might ask if she conforms to a patriar-
chal model of behaviour nonetheless, and question if she really goes to 
a better place in death, the faun providing ample cause to distrust his 
version of events. Although some have approved the film’s refusal to 
idealise its fairy tale motifs, the fact that every member of Ofelia’s family 
is dead by the end, bar her baby brother, provides a truly tragic finale, 
with the prodigal princess’s return suggested to be a dying girl’s delusion.
Duplicity and disavowal assume considerable significance in the 
Korean horror film