After an early flirtation with Hollywood on Mimic, director Guillermo del Toro returned to more familiar territory with The Devil’s Backbone, a Spanish-Mexican coproduction he co-wrote with Antonio Trashorras and David Munoz. Set during the Spanish Civil War, the movie follows a 12-year-old boy (Fernando Tielve) at a remote orphanage where an undetonated bomb, which had been dropped from a plane, stands like a sentinel in the courtyard. Also unnerving: a child ghost, known among the kids as “the one who sighs.” Del Toro considers history, politics, and art through a gothically poetic lens—that bomb is its own sort of phantom—and gets brave, wide-eyed performances from his young cast. Marisa Paredes and Federico Luppi are also strong as the headmistress and doctor, respectively, but Eduardo Noriega is missing a certain gravitas as Jacinto, a threatening caretaker who grew up in the orphanage (the problem becomes bigger as the various narrative threads point in his direction). It all leads to a particularly nasty ending, if a fitting one for a film where that which haunts is not necessarily a single specter, but an entire war.
(7/8/2022)
