Reality?

What is reality and how does it effect us when watching films say. Well reality is the world around us and the way we perceive it, im not going to fuck around with all the if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it crap, but if your senses think its real so will you. So we can assume that for someone to become absorbed into a story no matter what the medium of its telling it has to fool the senses.

I recently watched for the first time Pans Labyrinth a film which not only fools the senses pulling you into the story but also plays with the theme of reality within its own telling. Ofelia constructs or is let into a world of fairies fauns and child eating monsters. Not dissimilar to the monsters that exists in the real world for her. The father of her mothers new child, a fascist who enjoys torture and brutality, is in many ways more horrifying that the child eating monster of the pale man. He has no excuses for his actions the moral implications of which are horrifying to anyone. The sets for the fascist captains dinner party are layed out with strong similarities between those of the pale mans banquet hall.

The film plays with what is and isn't real it leaves the audience wondering what actually happened which in most other films would be a bad thing. Did Ofelia actually go back to the underworld kingdom? is this world we live in actually just a dream thought up by a child? Well lets hope not really, but it plays with you a little and brings you back to a time when everyone was young. Being scared of monsters and opening doors using just chalk and imagination.