| I’d be seriously misleading you if I described Guillermo del Toro’s remarkable The Devil’s Backbone (2001), as a Spanish ghost story. Yes, there is a ghost in it, but there is also a ghost in Hamlet and few would dare to be facile enough to label Shakespeare’s play as "a ghost story." In del Toro’s world, as in Shakespeare’s, ghosts can never be as terrifying as the deeds of the living.
It’s the end of the Spanish Civil War, and young Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is being unceremoniously dumped into the care of a remote orphanage. His father has just died in the conflict, but he is never told this and cannot understand why he has been abandoned. Other boys in the orphanage menace and/or befriend Carlos, who awkwardly and painfully begins to adjust to his new life.
The boys believe that the orphanage is haunted by a spirit they call "the one who sighs," and Carlos begins to glimpse signs of its existence – a shadow here, a whisper there, a flicker of movement – and a mystery far darker than that of a vengeful spirit slowly comes to light.
Carlos attempts to befriend the spirit, but his bravery gives out when the thing whispers its warning "many of you will die." The real horrors of The Devil’s Backbone, however, are quite mundane in nature, and soon ghosts are the least of Carlos’s worries.
The tone of The Devil’s Backbone reminds me of The Reflecting Skin (1990) – both films feature beautiful barren landscapes, characters fussing over strange keepsakes and young protagonists who are better prepared to deal with supernatural horrors than with flesh-and-blood ones. In fact, I kept thinking about The Reflecting Skin’s tagline ("Sometimes terrible things happen quite naturally") while watching Carlos’s predicament. Both films are moody, unusual, tragic and unforgettable – any fan of one should rush out and see the other.
The children of The Devil’s Backbone are not squeaky-clean Disney types, but realistically cruel and fallible human beings. It’s easy to see how they got this way, given the circumstances. These are kids who understand that horrible things can happen abruptly and for no reason – death can literally fall down from the sky at any moment. In fact, one of the film’s more potent images is the huge unexploded bomb that sticks out of the ground in the middle of the boy’s yard. The bomb has been defused (although the orphans still believe that it could explode at any minute), but its presence is a constant reminder that we live in a world in which people drop bombs on orphanages.
The adult characters are as complex and nuanced as the youngsters. Some of the adults are caring, compassionate and wise, but this only serves to make the violence of the world they inhabit all the more upsetting. One of the most wrenching scenes has nothing to do with ghosts, but simply follows the kindly Dr. Casares (played by the marvelous Federico Luppi from del Toro’s earlier film Cronos) as he walks through the town and witnesses the back alley execution of several political dissidents. He stands mute and paralyzed, flinching with each gunshot – and then has to lie when he’s asked if he recognized any of the victims.
The Devil’s Backbone has had two separate DVD releases, each containing a different audio commentary from del Toro, a practice he later repeated with the two different DVD versions of Hellboy (2004). The older version is actually the first director’s commentary del Toro had ever recorded and in it he reveals that The Devil’s Backbone is his favourite among his own films. He also describes it as "a Mario Bava western," which may sound outré, but is certainly a better description than "a Spanish ghost story." |
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