7: The Devil's Backbone

People often remember childhood as the best day's of their lives. It was all just running around carefree and playing. Every day was adventure, and the worst conceivable atrocity was sitting in school on a nice day. Whatever problems you had seemed trivial looking back through an adult's eyes. In the Devil's Backbone, Guillermo Del Toro tries to remind us all just what it feels like to be a child.

The film takes place near the end of the Spanish Civil War, in an orphanage for the children of dead soldiers. In the center of the orphanage is a bomb that had failed to go off. Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is left there by his mentor (for his own safety, but from a child's perspective it feels like being abandoned). The other kid's start picking on him, and every night he sees the ghost of a dead boy trying to scare him off. None of the adult's will believe him, and none of the children like him enough to care one way or the other.

The Devil's Backbone focuses on one aspect of childhood that is rarely shown in film: powerlessness. These kid's are pushed and pulled by adult politics they have no influence over. They barely understand what is going on. There is nothing they can do to prevent what is happening. And it's not just the children that are powerless. The adult's of the orphanage are on the losing side of the war. If they were discovered, they and the children they are responsible for would be shot as traitors. They are pushed and pulled by national politics that they have no influence over. The world of The Devil's Backbone is one of helplessness and dread.

The film never shies away from the wrongness of its premise. Children die. The first shot of the film is the death of a child and the hiding of his body. When he comes back as a ghost, the makeup effects only serve to make him appear more childlike. They act like kid's act and talk like kid's talk. The film's ending evokes William Golding's Lord of the Flies, with the children's innocence lost.

The thing that really makes the film work is how good the adult character's are. Dr Casares. (Federico Luppi) is a simple man of science who doesn't believe in any of that superstitious nonsense. He is fiercely dedicated to the children and his wife. He is the clever and inspiring and protective, the perfect father figure for all of these children. Then there's Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who isn't so perfect. In fact, he is absolute scum. He might be the antagonist who has angered me personally on this list. He is a man who never grew out of bullying to get his way, stuck raising orphans for a lost cause. He becomes increasingly deranged and desperate as the film goes on. Just when you think he is as bad as he could possibly be, he becomes much worse.

Guillermo Del Toro is a complicated, almost paradoxical director, and this film is the perfect example of that. A bleak story told stylishly. The film at times is genuinely beautiful, which makes the rest of it even more disturbing by contrast. He makes you care about the people, but then does horrible thing's to them. His horror film's feel more like Greek tragedies than the exciting, frenetic slashers you so often see from other filmmakers. That's what makes them so compelling.