3/20/2023 0 Comments Devils backbone movie![]() In the end, the horror is not that something otherworldly has violated the innocence of a child, but that it is precisely someone non-magical, someone completely human who is revealed as a beast worse than any monster a special effects artist could dream up. ![]() Carlos is guided on his quest to discover some essential kernel of truth about the orphanage by a ghost his own age a child who has obviously been subjected to some brutality. Instead, del Toro opts for magical realism, where the everyday world is altered by some thing or event that seems explicitly imaginary but has become real. What makes The Devil’s Backbone extraordinary is that it doesn’t rely on the supernatural scare tactics of most horror movies. Lovely young teacher Conchita (Irene Visedo) emerges as one of the film’s chief moral victors, but also as one of its most tragic characters. The potency of their growing ideological conflict is matched only by the angst of their secret and rather incestuous relationship. Carmen, whose wooden leg is another of del Toro’s metaphorical devices, struggles to match her leftist idealism against a newer, more totalitarian mindset represented by the orphanage’s groundskeeper, Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega). While Carlos begins to investigate the mysterious ghost, the adults around him navigate through a maze of political and relational conflicts. Though none of the boys have said as much, Carlos wonders if the mystery of the one who sighs is somehow connected to the disappearance of one of the orphans, Santi (Junio Valverde). It’s on this first trip to the kitchen that we hear about the one who sighs, an unknown phantasm that haunts the orphanage at night. When Carlos knocks over one of two jugs of water in the boys’ room in the middle of the night, Jaime insists that he sneak down to the kitchen and refill the jug.Scared but not dumb, Carlos challenges Jaime to go with him. A relatively well-educated child who arrived at the orphanage with a tutor, he also becomes a target for the other boys, especially Jaime. No one has told him that his parents are dead, but it quickly becomes apparent to him that he might not be in the orphanage if they weren’t. ![]() From the film’s very opening scenes, where we see young Jaime (Inigo Garces) kneeling over the body of a dying boy, we know that there is evil within this place that cannot be easily known or expunged.įor Carlos, adjusting to life at the orphanage is tough. It seems like a desperate, sad place, but how else might an orphanage caught in the midst of a civil war seem? No, the volatility that is lurking here is much deeper than the politics of men. The volatility of the orphanage, like the volatility of the bomb that lies at its center, is initially hidden from view. While a teacher assures Carlos that the bomb has been defused and won’t explode, it’s power as a signifier remains. When Carlos arrives in the outer courtyard, he immediately notices a large, undischarged bomb sunken into the ground. Because of its strong connections to the resistance movement, the orphanage becomes a target for Franco’s troops. Young Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is brought to the orphanage by his tutor, a republic leftist fighter who can’t care him after the death of the boy’s father in battle.ĭoctor Casares (Federico Luppi) and Carmen (Marisa Paredes) run the home for orphans, where they are also concealing a large stash of the leftist cause’s gold. ![]() The Devil’s Backbone ( El Espinozo del Diablo) is set in a leftist orphanage in a rural area during the final year of the Spanish Civil War. ![]() “This is The Devil’s Backbone the way the devil intended it to be seen,” says director Guillermo del Toro in his introduction to the Criterion Collection release of his weighty, gothic horror masterpiece. Something dead which still seems to be alive. “What is a ghost? A tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and time again? An instant of pain, perhaps. ![]()
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