The Devil’s Backbone - B

El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone), a Spanish language film released in 2001, is a children’s ghost story dealing with justice, loss, greed, and lust in an orphanage housing the children left parentless during the Spanish Civil War. The first of two “fairy tales” by writer/director Guillermo del Toro set in Spain during Franco’s rise to power, 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth (A) is the other, (this year’s El Orfanato was also produced by del Toro and loosely fits with the themes of these two), Backbone is best seen as a character sketch and experiment in tone and mood that is fully realized in the far superior Labyrinth. Still, Backbone has some things to say of its own and some truly terrifying moments.

Carlos is a 10-year-old, recently orphaned boy (he hasn’t even been told his parents are dead) who is left at an all-boys orphanage ran by Carmen, an early middle-aged woman with a wooden leg, and Casares, an older medical doctor who loves her, but, in this pre-Viagra age, hasn’t the wherewithal to consummate his desire. This leaves Carmen in the grips of the caretaker Jacinto a brutish, violent young man who first came to the home as an orphan and is being consumed by a secret past. Upon arriving, Carlos is confronted by the ghost of a bleeding, drowned boy—a truly terrifying vision with ghostly blood eternally floating upward as if the air were water. The apparition seems intent on both scaring and warning Carlos of an impending doom. Soon, Franco’s advancing army forces the nationalist-leaning Casares and Carmen to evacuate the orphans and retreat, starting a tragic chain of events that few inhabitants will survive.

Unlike most other adult ghost stories involving children, both this and Labyrinth are told from the children’s perspective. And like Labyrinth, del Toro’s world is one in which children are neither innocent nor safe. They attack, are attacked, loose limbs, and die. And even as adults try to shelter them from the events of their life, the children must deal with the very real consequences of these events. They do this better and more shrewdly than expected, but, as seen in Jacinto, they bear deep marks from having grown-up too quickly. B