The Devil's Backbone Is Yet Another Guillermo Del Toro Winner That Merges Scares With Brains

Guillermo Del Toro writing and directing tales that shine a more humanistic gaze upon fantasy creatures in the middle of a large-scale war seems to serve the auteur filmmaker well if his 2006 classic Pan's Labyrinth and the subject of this review, The Devil's Backbone, are any indication. For the premise of the latter film, Del Toro, along with David Munoz and Antonio Trashorras, have concocted a tale about orphan Carlos (Fernando Tielve) being dropped off at an orphanage in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. Here, Carlos finds himself the target of constant bullying by the orphans who have been held here for far longer than he has, though this bullying does result in Carlos making a major discovery.

That discovery entails Carlos stumbling onto a ghost that haunts the orphanage with the ghost itself being the spirit of a child named Santi (Junio Valverde). Carlos discovering this specter earns him the interest of some of his tormentors while this event collides right in the middle of some drama occurring between the various adults who run this orphanage. Specifically, groundskeeper Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) is convinced gold lies underneath the orphanage and wants to take it for himself while he's also having an affair with Carmen (Marisa Paredes), which disrupts the relationship Carmen already has with the orphanage's doctor Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi).

The way The Devil's Backbone handles its depiction of the events of the Spanish Civil War are a kind of wonderful conundrum as the viewer is spared large-scale depictions of the carnage such a war wrought on countless individuals, but its impact is still very much felt by the way it influences the actions of various characters in the story. Would Jacinto be this desperate for cash if he were not trying to survive in a seemingly endless war? Would numerous members of the orphanage even be there if their parents hadn't been wiped out by this war? Hell, the bomb that lies in the middle of the orphanage wouldn't even be there if it weren't for this Spanish Civil War.

The three writers of The Devil's Backbone are obviously shifting their focus away from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War onto the way normal people react in times of hardship. Will you be selfless and help the downtrodden even as you attempt to save your own skin or will you take a "every man for himself" approach? It's clear that The Devil's Backbone is staunchly in favor of human beings acting selfless even in the face of cataclysmic war, but it depicts this crucial theme in a realistic manner by way of writing its characters as actual human beings. We can see ourselves in their actions, good or bad, and that means moments of self-sacrifice or selfishness really ring true in their realism.

Part of this realism comes from Carlos and his fellow adolescent orphans acting like actual kids, which makes the sight of them being placed into precarious danger throughout the third act register as thoroughly engrossing. There's a similar level of realism in the adult characters of Carmen and Casares, with Federico Luppi bringing an engaging sense of warmth to the latter character that makes it incredibly easy to see why Carlos would warm up to him. Once you make it clear that these are actual well-rounded people who are trying to survive a war much bigger than they are, it's hard not to get dramatically invested in what transpires in the well-structured plot. 

It's isn't all just naturalistic conversations between human beings of course, there's also the matter of the ghost itself whose backstory itself provides a great opportunity to examine how the horrors of war can come not just from large armies but also from individual human beings acting out of fear and self-absorbed tendencies. It's fantastic just how well The Devil's Backbone merges heightened fantasy entities and thoughtful ruminations on the way war impacts the human psyche, and to boot, there's a real inventive design to this movies depiction of a ghost, with Santi's appearance constantly shifting back and forth between being either slightly more human-like or more skeleton-like within the blink of an eye. 

The same level of care going into the introspective qualities of The Devil's Backbone also go into the various appearances of ghost Santi, with Guillermo Del Toro and editor Luis De La Madrid bringing this sense of theatricality into the way they build up to Santi's appearances early on in the story when the various characters just consider him to be a spooky monster. Once Carlos and his pals realize there's more to him than just that, Santi appears in a more visually restrained manner, he can just show up in a scene now without any bombastic scary music or similar traits to accompany his arrival.  Such elements previously used to accompany any appearance of Santi's ghost are now eschewed because he's no longer thought of as a traditional monster but rather a tormented human being, he can. 

There's so many thoughtful details like that to be found in The Devil's Backbone which is one of the few movies I could adequately describe as simultaneously a great ghost story and a magnificent rumination of how war impacts the normal people just trying to survive in such horrendous circumstances. Perhaps it sounds like those two drastically different elements couldn't possibly synchronize well together, but believe you me, they very much do in The Devil's Backbone, which would be far from the last time Del Toro wrung absorbing pathos out of merging harsh reality with stylized fantasy entities.