Guillermo del Toro's Devil's Backbone film review

TIFF [2001]

(Spain/Mexico 2001, 106 minutes)
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Written by Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, David Muñoz
Cast: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Irene Visedo

Movie Review

In an environment where films must be designed to fill specific "sections" of video stores ("Action", "Drama", "Family"), a true find like "The Devil's Backbone (El Espinazo del Diablo) "-- the new thriller from the gifted director of "Cronos" and "Mimic" -- can fail to find a deserved audience because it defies such easy categorization. Is it a horror film? Melancholy childrens' fable? Art-house "magical realist" allegory? It's all of the above, insists writer director Guillermo Del Toro, back after a four-year absence from screens. "This is not so much a ghost story", the director qualified during his intro, "but a story with a ghost in it." Citing influences as disparate as Mark Twain and Arthur Machen, Del Toro (fresh from set of "Blade 2" in Prague) enthused about his lifelong love of Gothic romances and Euro-trash horror with equal volume (and believe me, amiable motormouth Del Toro is LOUD) and confessed that "The Devil's Backbone" is based upon his own personal encounter with the afterlife. A perceived message from a deceased uncle inspired him to draft a story -- originally a film school project -- in which true horror springs not from the presence of the supernatural, but from the living ghosts of those driven to--and doomed by--desperate acts during times of war.

In the courtyard of the Santa Lucia orphanage, an unexploded bomb stands imbedded into the earth, its skewed placement and internal echoes threatening impending detonation. Twelve-year old Carlos (Frederico Luppi) is left at the orphanage while his guardians enlist in the fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Kindly Professor Casares (serene "Cronos" vet Fernando Tielve) and patriotic Carmen (Marisa Parades) can offer only education, moral example, and the necessities for survival to empower the children against the anarchy that rages beyond the compound's walls. Carlos soon wins friends thanks to his comic book collection and knack for writing stories. During a midnight dare from the other orphans, Carlos encounters the ghost of Santi, a boy killed the night the Fascists dropped the bomb. Santi warns of more tragedies to come and pleas for Carlos to help him enact vengeance for his death. But a worse evil lurks in the hot-tempered arrogance of handyman Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega from Amenabar's "Open Your Eyes"), himself an orphan of Santa Lucia, who trades sexual favours to Carmen as if to spite Casares' selfless wisdom. Jacinto and his thug cohorts scheme to rob the orphanage of its stash of gold, and willfully compromise the boys' lives with a heist that goes fatally wrong. The walls offer no protection from a maniac's greed, likewise, no weapon can fend off comeuppance from beyond the grave.

Talk Back

A rare talent who can infuse the most horrific of images with a lyrical beauty and never loses sight of the human story amidst genre trappings (vampires, mutants, decomposed phantoms), Guillermo Del Toro has created his finest work yet -- a 21st century successor to Victor Erice's allegorical fable "Spirit Of The Beehive", which used the iconography of "Frankenstein" to explore the loss of childhood innocence in post-war Spain (I'd also bet that B-movie lover Del Toro is a fan of Frank LaLoggia's "grim" fairy tale "Lady In White". His trademarked chiaroscuro interiors (courtesy of "Cronos" DOP Guillermo Navaro) and seamless integration of FX are fully in the service of telling a complex story that amounts to one of the most enriching theatrical experiences I've had in years: "The Devil's Backbone" will alternately amuse, terrify, and sadden even those with little knowledge of the period and for whom the supernatural is merely a popcorn conceit.

Rather than cynically wallow in the downbeat and indulge in heavy-handed symbolism, Del Toro poses many questions and actually offers a solution with a final, uplifting visual: while circumstances demand that Casares rely on his gun to defend his "family", the compound's young survivors opt to renounce violence as they embark into a world from which they've known only terror. Suffice to say, the events of September 11 would later give the film added poignancy, even though I'd already decided "The Devil's Backbone" was my TIFF 2001 favorite before reality cruelly drove its suddenly timely and yet timelessly humane message home.

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