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Film: The Devil’s Backbone
Release date: 28th February 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 106 mins
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Marissa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Inigo Garces, Irene Visedo
Genre: Fantasy/Horror/Mystery/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: Blu-ray
Country: Spain/Mexico
Guillermo del Toro has established himself as one of the most popular auteurs working today. With critical success for Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, his two most recent films, del Toro has a certain imagery and style associated with him. In The Devil’s Backbone, his third feature film, this style is subdued into an atmospheric and effective ghost story.
Set in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War, The Devil’s Backbone follows the story of Carlos, a young boy who is taken to an orphanage by his revolutionary guardians after the death of his father. Located in the middle of a vast wasteland, it is home to a large number of orphan boys; an elderly lovelorn professor; a fiery principal with one leg; a former resident of the orphanage, who is now a caretaker with a nasty plan; and an ominous unexploded bomb.
As Carlos struggles to settle in with the other boys, he starts to see the ghost of a young boy wandering the orphanage, known to the others as “the one who sighs.” Jacinto, the caretaker, plots to steal some gold ingots kept by Carmen, the principal, until the “cause” needs them.
As tensions grow in the war and the orphanage, the professor Dr Casares decides they have to leave the orphanage. But Jacinto and the boy ghost have other plans…
The Devil’s Backbone is not a typical del Toro film. The director is normally known for his fantastical visions and horrific monsters, but these are absent here, replaced with a subtle spooky atmosphere. There are still hints of his trademark gruesome imagery, such as the unborn foetuses with mutated spinal cords suspended in jars in Dr Casares’ office. However, those who come to the film expecting monsters or big set pieces will be disappointed. What they will find is an effective ghost story, which builds up tension and suspense without reverting to typical horror clichés involving a child ghost.
Using subtle sound design and a visually distinctive location, del Toro creates a sense of increasing suspense as all the different parties begin to come into conflict with each other. It is no surprise that del Toro is a huge Hitchcock fan, using the unexploded bomb in the centre of the orphanage as a symbol of all the tensions simmering in the orphanage. The story builds effectively, and it soon becomes clear that the true villain of the piece is Jacinto, the callous caretaker played with menace by the excellent Eduardo Noriega. Like in most del Toro films, the monster is the man, not the beast.
The true stars of the film are the cast of children. Del Toro often manages to obtain great performances from young actors, and this film is no exception. Led by Carlos and Jaime, played by Fernando Tielve and Inigo Garces, the young ensemble create distinctive well rounded characters with the screen time they receive. They are all believable, even when the story becomes dramatic and more violent towards the end. The rest of the cast all perform admirably, whilst veteran actor Federico Luppi as Dr Casares really conveys the sense of years lost to unrequited love.
Shot by del Toro’s frequent collaborator Guillermo Navarro, the film is a visual treat. Forgoing the fantastic vistas and worlds that he normally creates, del Toro uses the location and colours to bring us into this world. Whether it’s the empty coldness of the hallways at night, or the blinding brightness of the sun during the day, each shot is arranged with meticulous detail. There are also many references to classic westerns; the famous shot from John Ford’s The Searchers is evoked several times, adding to the sense of isolation.
The state of limbo the characters seem to be in is referenced again and again, adding a deeper layer to the story and the mythology of the ghost story on show. Despite the references to Japanese horror films (the ghost design was based on recent, popular J-Horror films such as Ringu or Ju-On: The Grudge), there are no cheap scares. Everything feels necessary, and as such, when the pieces come together at the end, it is an extremely satisfying conclusion.
It seems a shame that del Toro has found success the way he has. With the big-budgeted The Mountains Of Madness due to start filming this year - Tom Cruise supposedly in the running for the lead role - it will be a long time before we have another personal film such as The Devil’s Backbone from Del Toro. Which is a shame as del Toro has proved in this film, and his earlier and later works Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth, that he can take a genre movie and inject it with warmth, humanity and a deeper meaning.
Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone is an excellent film. More subtle and nuanced than his Hollywood output, but with no lack of creativity or imagination. Those expecting more of an out and out horror may find that there are less kills or scares than they would expect. They will, however, find an atmospheric ghost story which makes you think. JDW
Film: The Devil's Backbone
Release date: 25th March 2002
Certificate: 15
Running time: 103 mins
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Íñigo Garcés
Genre: Fantasy/Horror/Mystery/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Spain/Mexico
It may not have gathered as much critical acclaim as Pan’s Labyrinth, nor achieved the commercial success of Hellboy or Blade 2, but it was The Devil’s Backbone (2001) that Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro described as his most personal film.
With the Fascist forces in the ascendancy during the final days of the Spanish Civil War, young Carlos becomes the latest addition to the number of war orphans under the care of the kindly Dr. Casares and his devoted headmistress Carmen. In addition to the dozens of young boys, the orphanage also houses a cache of gold intended for the Republican cause – a treasure that’s constantly on the mind of the devious caretaker Jacinto.
On his arrival, Carlos immediately clashes with the class bully, and it’s not long before he’s on the receiving end of Jacinto’s violent, quick-temper. But this soon becomes the least of his worries, as he begins to hear rumours of a mysterious presence haunting the orphanage, referred to by the other boys as “the one who sighs.”
After earning his peers’ respect with a harrowing late-night journey into the school’s kitchen, Carlos begins to learn some more unsettling news: one of the young boys (whose bed Carlos has inherited) recently vanished. While several of the boys believe that Santi simply ran away, a few of the older boys suspect murder – and nearly all the boys believe that Santi is still around, albeit in ghostly form.
When Carlos confirms the boys’ fears, and encounters the ghost of Santi who tells him that “many will die,” it is a prediction that comes less as a threat than as a warning…
Foreshadowing many of the themes of The Devil’s Backbone and its companion piece Pan’s Labyrinth is a wonderful 1973 Spanish film called The Spirit Of The Beehive. Directed by Victor Erice, it relates the story of 6-year-old Ana who begins to associate a Republican solider hiding from Franco’s troops in her parents’ sheepfold with the monster from Frankenstein, after a touring film company projects the film upon a wall in her hometown. It’s neither a horror film nor a supernatural thriller, but, in many ways, it can be seen as the antecedent to a particularly Spanish sub-genre, where the painful reality of the Civil War and the Fascist ascent to power is seen through the eyes of a young child. Within this tradition, Del Toro has made a particular brand of the supernatural his own – one in which the horror contained in real life is so all-encompassing that his ghosts and monsters begin to elicit more sympathy than terror in relation to it. It’s such a central aspect of Del Toro’s art that his films become more overwhelmingly sad than frightening. His ghosts are as much haunted as they haunt, wracked figures of loneliness and hurt, seemingly born out of a child’s imagination, and in this film, as in the Del Toro produced The Orphanage, taking the form of a child.
The ghost of Santi appears very early in the film, and it is made clear from the off that he is, in fact, a ghost. Del Toro does not go in for any ambiguity here, never suggesting his apparition as a figment of the imagination so often seen in more conventional ghost stories. In terms of frights, the early encounters with the ghost are the most powerful. Del Toro’s use of sound is possibly the most effective aspect – a soundtrack of mysterious rustlings, footsteps and disembodied screams - the spooky voice of Santi more like a death-rattle than a sigh. When we see him fully, he’s a no less disconcerting and creepy presence - black eyes in a pale Goya-mask of a face, his outline shimmering in ripples like the stream of blood which floats upwards from his head, forever trapped in the moment of his watery death. As the film progresses, though, and we learn more about Santi the boy, our fear dissipates slightly, as we begin to sympathise with him as a victim of the same tragedies as the other orphans. For this reason, he never truly seems a threat to the boys, and when he warns of some future catastrophe destined to occur, sure enough, it comes not from Santi, nor from any other supernatural force, but from all-too-human actions inspired by greed and spite.
Just as in Pan’s Labyrinth, the true horror of the film emanates less from the realms of make-believe than from a world recognisably our own. The secluded orphanage is the most obvious symbol of a country torn apart by Civil War, home to the fatherless, and representing a Spain abandoned by the international community as the Fascist forces gain supremacy. The unexploded bomb that lies embedded in the courtyard highlights the fact that the orphanage’s seclusion does not make it any more of a haven from the surrounding troubles, however.
Appropriately, most of the characters are damaged in some way - all part of the same catastrophic events of the Civil War. Carmen is in a constant state of discomfort from her prosthetic leg. The doctor’s impotence not only prevents him from acting on his feelings for Carmen, but is symbolic of a wider inability to act – to put his humanist values into action against the brutal dictates of the Fascists. Even Jacinto, the villain of the piece, is not wholly without sympathy - an abandoned orphan himself, his fragile emotional state cannot have been helped by entering into a sexual relationship with Carmen not long after he turned 17; one he is only too aware as being purely sexual, and almost incestuous in light of the older woman’s role as mother figure to the boys. It is this complexity in terms of character that elevates the film far beyond standard ghost story fare. In fact, Del Toro has so much going on behind his ghost story, it’s a minor miracle the film makes sense at all.
That it does is testament to Del Toro’s exquisite craftsmanship. M. Night Shyamalan could learn much from the cohesion of The Devil’s Backbone’s screenplay, with its plot twists and multiple layers never feeling forced or used merely for effect. Backing up the cohesion is a cinematography which eschews generic gloom and claustrophobia in favour of a vibrant use of colour (with much of the film taking place in daylight, baking under the Spanish sun), and with buildings and everyday objects strangely oversized, as though seen through a child’s eyes. The predominance of red and yellow tones (in sandstone buildings, in the parched desert surrounding the orphanage, in blood) indicates this is a film very much about Spain, but it is amber that is the most thematically significant. Amber tones link Santi’s watery grave to the deformed embryos preserved in the doctor’s jars, as well as relating to the voiceover which opens the film defining a ghost as “a moment of pain…an insect trapped in amber.”
The film is so visually polished, so Hollywood slick, and seemingly custom-built for the appreciation of a mainstream audience, that at first you might not notice just how incredibly dark some of its themes are. That we see the fascistic Jacinto in one early scene naked and so eroticised even the freedom-fighter Carmen cannot resist him suggests Del Toro is implying there is something inherently sexy about fascism, something in its call to order and obedience that we are irresistibly drawn to. It is one of the film’s ironies that the children, presumably the most vulnerable to the violence and brutality of war, must finally resort to violence themselves, in a scene reminiscent of Lord Of The Flies, in order to both save their lives and reassert values of humanism and goodness against so much totalitarian barbarity. Such themes give The Devil’s Backbone the ability to disturb and move long after the initial thrills and shocks of more run-of-the-mill horror films have faded away.
While The Devil’s Backbone falls just short of being a masterpiece in quite the same way as Pan’s Labyrinth, it is still a small gem of a movie. Forgetting Del Toro’s own output, it’s hard to think of many horror films in recent memory possessing quite as much depth, sub-text and emotional impact. One of the best films to emerge from that fertile period of Spanish horror during the first decade of this century, and highly recommended. GJK
