Staff Pick: The Devils Backbone

15A106 min

Guillermo Del Toro’s third feature film and his first Spanish-Mexican co-production, The Devil’s Backbone (2001) is a landmark in Del Toro’s career. Set against the Spanish revolution in which ghostly hauntings intertwine with the horrors of civil war, all presented from the point of view of an orphan child, the film is a natural precursor to Del Toro’s critically acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Where Pan’s Labyrinth leans into fantasy, presenting a magical if frightening realm beneath the real world, The Devil’s Backbone is hauntingly realistic. Beginning with the arrival of the recently orphaned child Carlos, the film is grounded in his experience of the everyday realities of its war-torn landscape and the loneliness and isolation of the orphanage. Integrated within this realism is the spectral uncanniness of the child ghost, lending the film a tangible sense of loss and grief. The film was shot by the acclaimed Mexican cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, known for his work on Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy II (2008), and Pacific Rim (2013), but also as a director of television horror, including Them (2021), Preacher (2016-2019), and Hannibal (2013-2015). His imagery offers a striking contrast between the stark sun-drenched desert landscapes and the gothic nighttime interiors, and infuses the film with the feeling of a nightmare erupting within the real world. The Devel’s Backbone is the first of Del Toro’s reimagined Gothic fairy tales that would become the hallmark of his exhilarating career in which the monsters are all too human and the supernatural acts as a haunting reminder of our mortality.

Spanish with English subtitles