Devil's Backbone, The

Aroview: This elegant amalgam of melodrama and horror movie set in a boys orphanage during the Spanish Civil War is rich in baroque atmospherics, and features a high-profile Spanish cast, but for our money is missing the story innovation that set apart the director’s debut, CRONOS.

Del Toro achieves creepy more than scary, here replaying his trademark motifs (Catholic angst, duplicity, and entomology) for a story (as the director claims) “not about ghosts, but with them”, the horror elements becoming secondary to its nobler ambitions as a political allegory and wartime melodrama of desperation and betrayal.

NZ International Film Festival 2002

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