The Devil's Backbone (2001)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Spain, 1939. In the last days of the Spanish Civil War, the young Carlos arrives at the Santa Lucía orphanage, where he will make friends and enemies as he follows the quiet footsteps of a mysterious presence eager for revenge.
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What critics compared The Devil's Backbone to
One of those revealed credits is for executive producer Guillermo Del Toro, whose atmospheric Spain-set horror films The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth are another strong influence on The Orphanage, which as it happens is also an atmospheric horror film set in Spain.
A doom-laden Spanish thriller about the ghostly goings-on of castoff children, The Orphanage isn't as scary as Guillermo Del Toro's similarly themed The Devil's Backbone.
Here The Orphanage recalls previous haunted house movies, from Robert Wise’s The Haunting and Kubrick’s The Shining, to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and The Devil’s Backbone (whose brilliant, bighearted director, Guillermo del Toro, is the present film’s producer).
Horror films with an elegant touch are fast becoming a Spanish movie tradition, as witness The Devil’s Backbone, directed in Spain by Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro, and the Nicole Kidman starrer The Others, from Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar.
It's a Spanish production, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, whose work has mainly been in Spanish television and music videos, but it was produced by Guillermo del Toro of "Pan's Labyrinth," "Hellboy," and "The Devil's Backbone" fame.
Art-house hits from the 1970s like "Cría Cuervos" and "Spirit of the Beehive" told of phantasms and repression and, more recently, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has crossed the Atlantic to make acclaimed horror-fantasies there: "The Devil's Backbone" (2001) and "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006).
Just as The Others looked to Turn of the Screw/ The Innocents as inspiration, The Devils Backbone is an homage to horror comic books, and comic books themselves play a part in the story.
With its complex characters and air of understatement, The Devil's Backbone is far different in style from the director's recent blockbuster, the gleefully ballistic Blade 2. Like Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, it harks back not only to the more restrained style of '60s horror pictures like The Haunting and The Innocents, but to 19th-century gothic-romance novels and the ghost stories of Henry James.
Guillermo del Toro — the director of such minor masterpieces as “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” — weakens his sphere of influence by producing a sorely underdeveloped horror movie that manufactures scares from the crudest of tropes.
Granted, had the director of "The Devil's Backbone" and the terrific "Pan's Labyrinth" also helmed this film, the results might have been more effective.
As with his own “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” this is a film about children having to deal with the horrors of the adult world, not all of them supernatural.
The result is a visually accomplished film similar in look and tone to del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Bayona’s Orphanage .
Del Toro and his co-writers — Patrick McHale for the screenplay and Matthew Robbins for the story — retain the setting of Collodi’s land, Italy, but the time frame has been bumped up into the 20th century, during the reign of Benito Mussolini and the fascists (in this way, GDT’s Pinocchio can be seen as a spiritual successor to the director’s condemnations of Franco’s Spain, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth ).
In this way, Pinocchio is of a piece with works like Pan’s Labyrinth (Swinton’s wood sprite reminds one of Doug Jones’ faun) and The Devil’s Backbone (one shot of a bomb dropping from the POV of the bomber is repeated in both films) — morality tales presented through the otherworldly sheen of the supernatural.
It’s a very blatant metaphor, but one where Pinocchio finds true inspiration, interpreting familiar story beats in a manner that makes it feel like the final part of a trilogy that began with The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth , two other tales about children contending with the evils of fascism.
It’s more The Devil’s Backbone than Disney, Pinocchio by way of Pan’s Labyrinth .
The director behind The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth only plays with fairy tales when he can put such a gothic and grave stamp on them.
As you might expect from the man behind “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” there’s a dark, violent sense of consequence to this one, a healthy sense of grotesquerie, that makes its happy ending — yes, that’s still on the cards, but not exactly as you’d expect — feel hard-earned.
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Clearly espousing beliefs that formed the tonal bedrocks for “Kronos,” “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” del Toro points out how childhood is fraught with horror due to physical and social limitations inherent to maturation.
But his newest project finds Del Toro squarely back in the lush, deeply humane and fantastically surreal territory that he mined to near-perfection in Spanish-language movies like Cronos, his 2001 masterpiece The Devil’s Backbone, and his 2006 classic Pan’s Labyrinth.
The story definitely feels more comic-book than anything, which is okay I guess, but I prefer del Toro’s deeper delves into history and character (The Devil’s Backbone is still my fave).
Sometimes those ghosts are literal — in his movies Crimson Peak and The Devil’s Backbone, they’re the shades of the dead, actively seeking vengeance against those who wronged them.
At his best, though — in “The Devil’s Backbone,” “Pan’s Labyrinth” and now, at last, again — he fuses a fan’s ardor with a romantic sensibility that is startling in its sincerity.
From chilling yet tender films like The Devil’s Backbone to Pan’s Labyrinth, and Crimson Peak, he’s offered creatures terrifying, yet uniquely beautiful.
Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro quickly became an audience favorite following the success of his debut feature Cronos in 1993 and then The Devil’s Backbone in 2001.
The Princess Bride, Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Jodorowsky’s Fando and Lis are all ingredients for Tarsem’s spellbinding movie (unfortunately saddled with a 15 cert for strong violence) but kids and adults sat in front of this are unlikely to forget its mystical atmosphere, achingly detailed visuals (big screen or HD viewings are mandatory), and beguiling story.
In that respect, the film is closest to Guillermo del Toro's diptych of films about children discovering the fantastic, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth .
The latter should have launched Bayona to the top of the A-list, but never quite found its audience in the U.S., and so he regroups, as like-minded Mexican helmer Guillermo del Toro did on “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” to a more personal project (en route to directing the next “Jurassic Park” sequel).
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Go rent "The Orphanage" again, or "The Devil's Backbone."
Between the likes of J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage , Alejandro Amenábar The Others , or Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone , there's a sense of collective spirit at work here.