What I really like about the film is that it embraces realism and naturalism, in style, structure, and substance. Yet, it still plays as hopeful, uplifting, and inspirational, just in a more honest way.
Juan Antonio Bayona: I was always trying to be as faithful as possible to the emotion, even more than the facts–though we stayed very close to the facts. I wanted the audience to feel the journey.
I realized that what would be interesting would be to create an emotional journey, so the audience could go with the characters, feel all the emotions, but then send the audience back home without an explanation of it all. Because no one gets explanations in life.
These people were happy and wealthy and without problems, and suddenly they found themselves in Hell, and then someone put them back in a plane and sent them back home without an explanation. So I like to make the audience feel that, to provoke them to think about the meaning of that.
There is that sense of these humans being plucked up by fate and surviving purely by luck.