The Devil's Backbone (Special Edition)

Guillermo del Toro is one of the most celebrated young writer-directors currently working in cinema and his "Pan's Labyrinth" was my favorite film of 2006.

If you enjoy classy ghost stories, you're not going to want to miss this gem. Like "Pan's Labyrinth," "The Devils Backbone" is set in Spain during the the civil war, and like that film its main protagonist is a child and, save for resplendent cinematography by Guillermo Navarro and evocative music by Javier Navarette, that's where the similarities end.

Sorrow thrives at Santa Lucia School. There is indeed a ghost, but most of the residents are haunted by memories of happy families, exhausted passion and life before the war. Marisa Paredes, the aging actress in Almodovar's "All about My Mother," is captivating, Federico Luppi is moving, and Eduardo Noriega a beautiful, tortured villian. This is cinema on a grand scale.

[Just as an aside, as the Harry Potter films get darker and darker, del Toro gets my vote to helm at least one of the remaining films.]

Guillermo del Toro (who directed last years phenomenal Pan's Labyrinth) seems to be at his best when dealing with the paranormal; indeed, he has the uncommon gift of making the fantastic seem plausible. This film contains some of the most haunting and believable images I've seen on screen, and their efficacy was heightened by the director's understanding of when enough is enough. Ghost stories of any kind fail when the real or imagined ghost is absurdly presented. Most of today's contemporary "Master's of Horror" fail miserably.

It is 1939, and the Spanish Civil War is in its final days. Carmen and Doctor Casares run an orphanage for boys (one does wonder, why no girls?). The institution has a remarkable feature: in the middle of the courtyard is a bomb, the tip of which is embedded firmly in the ground. The bomb fell from the sky during a raid, but never exploded. It sits there, disarmed yet immovable, as a reminder of the violence in the outside world.

Carlos, a ten year old, is left at the orphanage, and though Carmen argues that they have no resources for more children, she accepts him and assigns him to bed number twelve, the bed that Santi slept in until the day he disappeared, which was the same day that the bomb fell from the sky. Carlos, predictably, begins to see visions and shadows, and at first, it isn't understood whether these come from his mind or if they are real. One night, a shadow tempts him from behind a bed curtain, and when Carlos pulls the curtain back, the shadow is gone. But the pitchers of water in the boys' room have fallen from their stands and break, and when the other children awaken, Carlos and Jaime each take a pitcher to refill in the kitchen. Carlos sees footprints in the spilled water. When the boys reach the kitchen, Jaime pumps water for his pitcher, and waits outside for Carlos. As Carlos is pumping, a rack of scissors in the kitchen falls and makes a loud noise. Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega, Open Your Eyes), the young caretaker who was once an orphan himself here, comes to investigate. Carlos flees down into the cellar to hide, and there he encounters the shadow that taunted him. He is touched by his phantom in the cellar, and we see, before anyone else, that this image is real. It is a boy, no older than Carlos, with the upper left portion of his forehead cracked open, and pale, blood seeping upwards as if the body was underwater. After touching Carlos, the ghost quickly disappears, but a voice says, "Many of you will die."

It is a prophecy that demands fulfillment.

There is gold in the orphanage, gold that Carmen and Casares give to those that will be called Nationalists, in support of their cause. Jacinto knows of this gold, and he wishes to steal it for himself. Not only is he bedding Conchita, the beautiful young cook (and Jaime's wide-eyed crush), but he is also taking Carmen as a bedmate. It is an unusual coupling; Carmen was the principal when Jacinto was an orphan there, and she has a wooden leg that she must set aside to accept him. (Some small irony there.) When they partner, Jacinto takes and replaces one key from her large ring of keys to see if it will be the one to open the safe that holds the gold.

With Jacinto, a ghost may be the least of their worries.

This is an excellent film, one better appreciated on the second viewing. I've heard it compared to The Others, but I doubt such comparisons would have been made if the director and writer of The Others, Alejandro Amenabar, was not also Mexican. While they are both ghost stories, they operate under completely different rules. I highly recommend this.

4½ stars rounded up to five for the convincing "paranormals".

people that do most of the suffering, the children, during war time. Pretty decent people run the only orphange for miles and miles, in the middle of nowhere during the Spanish Civil War. The young boy actors did very well in their parts, especially the "ghost" of the murdered boy.

Stark "ghost story" that some may compare to "Sixth Sense" yet, in my opinion, the two movies have little in common except on a very superficial level. The title, to me, only made sense upon a second viewing in the same way as its symbolism did. But then, I always watch movies I like more than once: the first time for the plot, the rest for the subtleties... The movie itself has none of the "sophistication" and the slickness of the typical American production. It is a raw and graphic drama set during the Spanish Civil War in a physically hostile landscape that fully complements the story. Although some questions remain unanswered at the end, I did not find this disturbing because, somehow, they were intellectual questions, rather than flaws in the plot. In other words, the answers were, somehow, not essential to the story. I would recommend this film simply because it is an excellent example of a "different" kind of movie making. Beyond that, it is convincingly acted, refreshingly and satisfylingly exotic. And eminently watchable.

Like del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" which has made huge waves in the non-Hollywood world, "The Devil's Backbone" is not easily categorised. Ghost story? yes, but much more. Picture of the scary tensions in Spain in the early days of the Civil War? yes, but more. Wonderful tale of how a group of children mature amid disaster and tragedy and come to be almost their own family, to replace the ones they never had or are separated from? Yes, but more. Rich in symbols and allegory...yes, but...

The richness of what T.S.Eliot called the "objective correlative" gives one that sense of underlying depth. For instance, there's the huge unexploded bomb stuck in the middle of the school courtyard. What is it but a metaphor for the hidden ghastly secret that waits to explode and reveal the reason for the mysterious ghost of the boy Santi? We only find out Santi's story near the end. Then there's the Devil's Backbone itself - in reality a congenital deformity where the spine is exposed, but spooky-looking in the sample floating in a jar of preservative - doesn't Jacinto exactly match that name? An irredeemable core of evil, like a Shakespeare villain or the Captain in Pan's Labyrinth. del Toro doesn't want to claim that there's something good in everyone: he says no, some characters are just irreversibly turned to the dark side, the very backbone of evil.

Then there's the subtle end-to end connections that add more richness. In the early scene of the school classroom, the children are shown the picture of a mammoth and the teacher makes the point that in these days the creatures were so big and strong that the hunters could only succeed by working closely together as a group. At the end, the children - that have survived - do exactly that as they hunt the gunman, and with pointed wooden spears yet!

I don't really agree with the reviewers who see a strong parallel to "The Lord of the Flies." The children here (wonderfully acted, by the way) don't regress to a primitive kind of anarchical ritual-filled state: in fact they bond ever more closely and deal very directly with the real world around them.

One thought: having seen this, I now don't think any more that in Pan's Labyrinth we are absolutely, definitely meant to take Ofelia's fantasy scenes as all in her mind. Clearly del Toro doesn't mind creating "real" supernatural entities. Perhaps in "Pan" he just wants to leave us in a state of permanent uncertainty, though the majority view among reviewers is that it's literally just fantasy.