"What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber."
This was the movie that made me fall in love with Guillermo del Toro as a filmmaker. I first learned of it in 2004, thanks to Bravo’s 100 SCARIEST MOVIE MOMENTS, which introduced me to a number of things I wouldn’t have discovered on my own at the time.
THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE in some ways even lays out the template for del Toro’s entire career to follow. It is about children growing up in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, which he would return to in PAN’S LABYRINTH, it is a gothic ghost story, which he would do even more explicitly in CRIMSON PEAK, and it presents a tender sympathy toward the supernatural, which is pretty much the unifying theme of *all* of his work.
DEVIL’S BACKBONE is set at an orphanage in Spain in 1939, the final year of the Spanish Civil War. Tensions are so high that an inert bomb literally sits in the courtyard, having been fired in an attack from Francisco Franco’s troops, and could go off at any moment. Our protagonist Carlos arrives at the orphanage before even learning that his father has died, and soon encounters the ghost of a boy named Santi, who died here.
The film is a mystery, so information is its main currency. How Santi died, when the bomb was dropped, how the two events may be related, all that is revealed as it goes on. There’s such a unique blend here of ghost story, coming of age story, wartime drama, and murder mystery. It never quite goes where you might expect it to go initially.
The monster is not what you would expect it to be. Del Toro is a filmmaker who is known for being deeply sympathetic to the outsider, for portraying what we perceive as monsters as more tender and aching than the humans around them and that is absolutely on display here. Tensions are high and remain high throughout the entire runtime. There’s a bomb that could go off any second and the orphanage is also hiding a stash of gold, and it’s the gold that truly turns out to be the time bomb. This is an incredible film.