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| One of the chilling posters for Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone |
The boy Carlos arrives at an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. Among the complexities that he tries to navigate in his life there is the eerie ghost of a recently deceased boy.
Devil's Backbone is a sweepingly beautiful war horror drama about the haunted life in a war-torn orphanage, with great cinematography by Guillermo Navarro (Pacific Rim (2013)). The film is the result of an unusual and bold script by great Mexican director Guillermo del Toro (Blade II (2002)), Antonio Trashorras and David Muñoz (Holy Night! (2011), both).
The children act impressively well, and it is a highly effective plot with Carlos (Fernando Tielve (The Shanghai Spell/El Embrujo de Shanghai (2002))) and the ghost boy Santi (Junio Valverde (Shiver/Eskalofrío (2008))). Of the adult actors, the film also features fine turns from Spain's great Marisa Paredes (All About My Mother/Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999)) as the institution's mysterious 'mother' with a strange prosthetic leg, Federico Luppi (Phase 7 (2010)) as her doctor husband and Eduardo Noreiga (Beauty and the Beast (2014)) as the vengeful caretaker. This is a solid, imaginative ghost story rich with details that makes it worth watching several times. It has a really soulful Spanish feel to it.
The Devil's Backbone is often compared to its director Toro's three-times Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth/El Laberinto del Fauno (2006), which is also a dark film about a child in war-torn Spain, but I find that Backbone is the better film of the two and still Toro's best film.
He has since its release grown to become one of the most prominent directors in the world with several huge upcoming projects: The first one to arrive will be the highly anticipated, hugely stylized gothic horror Crimson Peak (2015), which will be the director's first film since the kaiju movie Pacific Rim.
Related reviews:
Guillermo del Toro: Pacific Rim (2013) or, The Monster Resistance
Blade II (2002) or, The Vampire Ass-Kicker 2
Watch the strange American trailer for the film here, which, - characteristically (and ridiculously), - avoids revealing that Spanish is the spoken language in the film
Cost: 4.5 mil. $
Box office: 6.4 mil. $
= Big flop
[Despite being well-received critically, Devil's Backbone didn't make much money outside its native Spain, (where it made 3 mil. €.) It made 0.7 mil. $ (11 % of the total gross) in the US.]
What do you think of The Devil's Backbone?
Is it also your favorite Del Toro movie?
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