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THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE Send This Review to a Friend
The Spanish Civil War has long haunted the world of international politics, and director Guillermo del Toro has made a haunting film built around a ghost story as an allegory about the lingering memory of that war's horrors. The screenplay, which he co-wrote with Antonio Trashorras and David Munoz, ingeniously weaves the ghost tale with the terrible events in a school that shelters orphans of those who were fighting to preserve the Spanish Republic against the takeover by Franco.
The Santa Lucia School, in an isolated location, has an unexploded bomb symbolically protruding in its courtyard. On the night the bomb dropped Santi (Junio Valverde) a boy at the school, was killed, and his ghost wanders the institution and makes sporadic contact. The villain is the caretaker and former pupil Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who is fueled by deep-rooted anger and possessed by greed. He has been carrying on an affair with the headmistress Carmen, the widow of a pro-Republican poet. Played powerfully by the renowned actress Marisa Paredes, Carmen has an artificial leg and she is a key force in this unusual drama. Another exceptional actor is Federico Luppi as Casares, an elderly professor who symbolizes the society that is crumbling under the fascist attack.
A major part of the action falls to the youngsters, including Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a new arrival, and his nemesis, Jaime (Inigo Garces), who leads a faction of these deprived children.
"The Devil's Backbone" has some brutal and horrific moments, and evil simmers through the brooding story. One needs to come to it prepared. This is a most unusual blending of the supernatural and the political, illuminated by attention to the human aspect of those entangled in its web. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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