Thirty Great Movies You've Probably Never Seen: The Devil's Backbone

El espinazo del diablo [Spain]

Year: 2001

Director: Guillermo del Toro

In the past few years, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s reputation has soared. In 2006 his film Pan’s Labyrinth won three Academy Awards, and his two Hellboy films have done very good box office business. Film buffs were excited to hear Peter Jackson had hired him to direct the two upcoming films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

He wasn’t nearly as well known in this country when he made The Devil’s Backbone in 2001. Produced by Spanish film genius Pedro Almodovar, the movie turned me into a lifelong fan of this quirky, soulful director.

The movie takes place, like Pan’s Labyrinth did, during the Spanish Civil War. Specifically, in a rural boy’s orphanage.

The movie begins with a stunning sequence involving a large bomb falling from the sky over the orphanage. It lands in the middle of the complex’s courtyard . . . and doesn’t detonate. It becomes a visual fixture there.

Soon after, a young kid named Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is sent to the orphanage. Almost immediately he sees the ghost of another boy named Santi. It turns out the orphanage is a hive of activity going on behind the scenes. A young, handsome but brutish worker (Eduardo Noriega) is scheming to find a stash of gold that theoretically is hidden on the premises. He’s attempting to bribe the head of the orphanage (Marisa Paredes), with sex in order to discover the gold’s whereabouts. The second-in command is an old doctor (the wonderful Argentinean actor Federico Luppi) is technically Paredes’ boyfriend, but he can’t compete with the young stud in bed.

As the war grows closer and Noriega’s efforts to find the gold become more dangerous, the stakes get ratchet higher and higher. The young boys caught up in the turmoil do the best they can do to stave off disaster.

The twist in this story is that, as scary as the ghost is, it turns out he’s one of the good guys the real monsters are among the living…

One of the best elements of the movie is its strong cast. Marisa Paredes is a veteran of several Almodovar movies, including High Heels, The Flower of My Secret and, most notably, All About My Mother). Federico Luppi was memorable in John Sayles’ Men With Guns and has been in many Argentinean and Spanish films. Eduardo Noriega is a popular leading man in Spain. He played the lead in the stunning Open Your Eyes, which was remade in Hollywood as Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise in the Noriega role. Noriega is finally beginning to show up in English-language films. The beautiful Irene Visedo, who plays Noriega’s fiancée, later appeared in the well-received The Anarchist’s Wife.

The look of the movie is amazing as well. The cinematographer is the great Guillermo Navarro, who was the Director of Photography for Night at the Museum, Jackie Brown, Spy Kids, both Hellboy movies, and of course Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he won an Oscar.

This movie is a perfect bookend to Pan’s Labyrinth, and frankly, it’s a better movie. Fans of that movie and the Hellboy series should discover this dark, gothic tale of greed and retribution.

[Thirty Day Hub Challenge #7]