Related Reviews

Guillermo del Toro

• El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) (2006)
• Hellboy (2004)
• Blade II (2002)
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Federico Luppi

• Men With Guns (1997)

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The Devil's Backbone

Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone begins by dropping a bombshell. The ghost story that follows literally revolves around that bombshell, which whispers claim may still be live and ticking as it sits in the center of an orphanage's courtyard. Rumor abounds as a venial form of superstition, a greater social force that is, in the world of the film, ironically more than paranoiac fancy. Rumors—some true, some false—dance with secrets, science parries with religion, and military Nationalists put the squeeze on leftist Loyalists as a boy's innocence gives way to harsh experience.

In 1939, during the final week of the Spanish Civil War, twelve-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve) arrives at an orphanage in the Spanish desert. Despite a series of betrayals by those in whom he has put his trust, Carlos remains an open soul, and strikes up unlikely relationships with bully Jaime (Íñigo Garcés) and the home's doctor, Casares (Federico Luppi). The unlikeliest friendship of all develops between Carlos and Santi (Junio Valverde), the skull-cracked ghost of a murdered orphan boy. The secret of Santi's death forms the film's central mystery—and metaphor, as laid out in the film's framing narration by Casares: "What is a ghost? A tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead that still seems to be alive. An emotion, suspended in time..."

Of course, the Spanish Civil War is, too, a past that will not rest in peace. Del Toro's allegory positions orphanage administrator Carmen (Marisa Paredes), along with Casares, as representatives of the left, and hardened, ashamed former orphan Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega)—the home's threatening "caretaker"—as representative of the fascist right. Del Toro's Spanish Gothic sibling to his 2006 film Pan's Labyrinth appropriately weds elements of horror and twisted romance, with overlapping romantic relationships amongst the adult characters (also including Jacinto's fiancée Conchita, played by Irene Visedo).

The Devil's Backbone is pure, uncut del Toro. The filmmaker accomplishes riveting scenes of suspense and scares he honestly come by, sticking the landing of every effect he attempts. Design, as always with del Toro, is paramount and elegant, from the well-considered mise-en-scène of the courtyard (with central bomb like a mocking perversion of a fountain in a town plaza), the bunkhouse, the catacomb-like cellar to the fabulous ghost makeup, enhanced by special effects to have blood smokily floating out of Santi's head wound.

Happily, del Toro's after more than just genre goosing: in addition to the reflection on the lingering impact of the Spanish Civil War, he engages in philosophical struggle from the points of view of a growing boy and an old man, the latter a self-professed man of science who's also given to poetry and an apparent superstitious agnosticism, and the former learning from the old man the importance of defining his maturation by taking a moral posture that demonstrates his full height, even in the shadow of Goliath.