Watching Guillermo del Toro’s
Spanish-language films is always fascinating. If you listen to him
in interviews, when he talks about his English-language work, he
usually only talks about how much fun those projects are in
themselves. But when he talks about his Spanish-language work, he
talks about what the project means to him on an emotional level. And
speaking personally, I think this is largely an issue of budget.
Because if a Mexican studio gave him the budget of Pacific Rim,
then we’d probably just be watching a movie about giant
robots punching giant monsters with subtitles.
Del Toro said he had two concepts that
he wanted to communicate with The Devil’s Backbone, both of
which I think are seen clearly in the film. The first is the idea of
a ghost as a person trapped reliving the same experiences over and
over again. My understanding is that this is, in fact, his literal
belief.
The second point he wanted to make was
that childhood is not a happy time. Being a child, and therefore
powerless, is scary. He feels that most film makers have forgotten
what it’s like to be a child, and he wanted to capture the real
sense of the experience.
The movie takes place during the
Spanish Civil War and is centered around an orphanage. A young boy
named Carlos (Fernando Tielve), not knowing that his father has been
killed, is taken to the orphanage for what he believes to be a
temporary stay. And while there, he discovers that there’s an
unexploded bomb dropped by Franco’s military sitting in the yard,
and a mysterious, ghostly presence haunting the building.
The villain of this movie, Jacinto
(Eduardo Noriega), is probably one of the better movie villains I’ve
seen. He’s a young man who grew up in the orphanage and now works
there. Notably, the first time I saw this movie, it actually took me
by surprise that he was the villain. That may partially be because I
was expecting Franco’s forces to arrive, but also because he’s
portrayed quite sympathetically. He’s gruff and unpleasant, but
he’s also in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. Furthermore, he
seems to display at least some level of empathy with the children due
to having grown up there himself. But his eventual revelation as a
villain is handled with enough build-up to make it believable.
I somewhat question the need for the
ghost aspect of this film. The ghost is of a young boy named Santi,
(Andreas Muñoz),
who was previously murdered by Jacinto, and whose death has not been
discovered. The rest of the staff think that he ran off when the
bomb fell. The tragedy of his death was tangible enough without the
supernatural elements. In fact, I don’t believe that there was a
single plot point in this movie that couldn’t have been
established, or a single thing that couldn’t have been accomplished
by mundane means instead of through this supernatural contrivance.
So I’m tempted to say that the ghost would have worked better if
its existence had been left ambiguous. However, the visuals are
effective enough for me to really, really like the ghost, so I’ll
allow Del Toro to have it.
Jacinto’s motivation in the film is
to get his hands on some bars of gold which the orphanage is holding.
When he’s eventually forced to leave, he returns with a gang of
thugs to kill the adults and blow up the orphanage in an effort to
get into the safe. This forces the boys to take up arms against
Jacinto. Luckily for them, Jacinto is abandoned by his own gang, who
are not nearly stupid enough to stay at the orphanage while the war
escalates all around it.
The final confrontation is disturbing,
primarily because of its novelty. A group of children craft handmade
weapons and kill an adult entirely of their own volition. Usually,
children wielding the power of violence without adult assistance is
something reserved for fantasy. The closest analogy I can think of
is Hard Candy, and there’s a strong argument to be made that
Haley was entirely in Jeff’s head in that movie.
The movie still ends on a bitter note.
Jacinto’s death hasn’t changed the fact that the kids are in the
middle of the Spanish Civil War with no one to protect them. Del
Toro has also confirmed that the ghost is still repeating his own
tragic death, even with his spirit avenged. So in the end, Jacinto’s
death achieved nothing beyond the removal of an immediate, physical
threat.
I do recommend this movie. It’s
creepy, fun, and has a better idea of what it’s like to be a kid
than most Hollywood films. I don’t think anyone is going to run
screaming from it, and certainly it has its depressing moments, but
this isn’t a bloodbath, it’s a tragedy.
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