Review of The Devil's Backbone (2001) by Halfwelshman — 18 Mar 2012

The Devil's Backbone is a thematically rich, extremely well-performed and spooky ghost story. The film keeps you engaged throughout, and its very easy to get involved with, and to care about the characters.

Fernando Tielve's Carlos makes for a decent protagonist, Inigo Garces' Jaime, Eduardo Noriega's Jacinto and Marisa Paredes' Carmen are all complex, well-developed characters. Federico Luppi is also great as the story's narrator and philosophical anchor, Dr Casares.

Like all good tales of horror, the real scares are not to be found in the on-screen chills (of which there are many) but in what the creepy imagery represents. Yes, the film is about a ghost haunting an orphanage, but really it's about loss of innocence, the futility and horrors of war and the lives it ruins.

Though writer/director Guillermo del Toro is Mexican, the subject of his film, the Spanish Civil War, is clearly very personal to him. This can be seen especially when the film is viewed as only one half of a bigger idea (del Toro has stated that he sees the film as a sibling film to Pan's Labyrinth, and this is easy to see with both films using the Spanish Civil War to comment on the brutality of the real world, one through horror and the other through fantasy).

The only real drawback to the film (speaking from an English-speaking perspective) is the clunky, out-of-sync English subtitles that appear to be attached to all non-Spanish releases of the film. I can understand del Toro's apparent frustration, and his decision to personally oversee the translation of his next Spanish-language project, Pan's Labyrinth - the subtitles are jarring, distracting, and bordering on annoying.

Luckily, when a film is this rich and multi-faceted, even such a major drawback does not work to the utter detriment of the viewing experience as a whole. The Devil's Backbone remains a thoughtful, memorable human drama with a consistent creepy atmosphere and some incredibly dark thematic subtext.

It's a great film on its own terms, but when viewed along with its "sister" piece Pan's Labyrinth its nothing short of superb.