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Despite brutality in 'Devil's Backbone' tenderness still shows through

SEAN AXMAKE, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, December 20, 2001
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The villa sits alone and isolated, a crumbling oasis in a Spanish desert baked clay red by the dry yellow sun. In the courtyard, an unexploded bomb teeters in midfall. Chilly and chilling sighs whisper through a dark room and the echoes of wet footsteps splash through the hallway. A bone-white phantom of a boy floats in the air with a red wisp oozing from his scalp like a cloud and a halo of bubbles suspended around his head.

It could be the setting for an old-fashioned ghost story and Guillermo del Toro ("Cronos") fills it with elegantly spooky imagery and unsettling apparitions, but "The Devil's Backbone" is resolutely grounded in the horrors of real life: war, abandonment, betrayal, greed and murder.

In the collapsing days of the Spanish Civil War, in a makeshift orphanage where the sons of fallen Republican soldiers are protected by war widow Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and poet/doctor Casares (Federico Luppi), 10-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve) grows up fast amid the fear and anger and apprehension.

The ghost of a dead boy haunts the cellar kitchen of the school, moaning a promise that "many will die," while the bullying, scheming handyman Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), a former orphan himself, simmers with rage and petty greed as he plots to steal the school's hidden stash of gold.

The ghost story, eerie as it is, becomes an incidental yet unsettling grace note to the here-and-now dangers of the advancing Fascist troops and the fatal drive of gold fever. In a few places, it even distracts from the survival tale that develops in the brutal third act -- a display of human brutality in all its icy ruthlessness. Del Toro cuts to the core of violence in visceral cinematic punches and haunting images without resorting to gory details. As the evil human rot seeps through the villa's protective walls, the boys are forced to deal with the mercenary world on their own.

The film takes its name from a mutant fetus preserved in alcohol and displayed in the doctor's storeroom like a sideshow exhibit, but for all the superstition and spooks that surround the story, the real devil's backbone is the evil that men do. What gives the story resonance is the tenderness and sacrifice and even innocence del Toro reveals amid the savagery.