The Devil’s Backbone

Set during the Spanish Civil War, The Devil’s Backbone follows 12-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve) as he’s sent to an isolated orphanage after the death of his father – with the movie detailing Carlos’ encounters with several key residents and, eventually, his efforts at solving the murder of a fellow student. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has infused The Devil’s Backbone with an almost excessively deliberate pace that is, at the outset, not too problematic, with the movie’s watchable feel perpetuated by del Toro’s atmospheric visuals and the periodic inclusion of impressively riveting sequences (eg Carlos’ first encounter with the dead pupil). There reaches a point, however, at which the narrative’s lulls become frequent and impossible to overlook, as del Toro, along with cowriters Antonio Trashorras and David Muñoz, places far-too-prominent an emphasis on the melodramatic happenings within the aforementioned orphanage – with the most obvious (and lamentable) example of this the tedious love triangle between the establishment’s headmistress (Marisa Paredes’s Carmen), sole professor (Federico Luppi’s Dr. Casares), and groundskeeper (Eduardo Noriega’s Jacinto). It is, as such, not surprising to note that the movie peters out significantly as it progresses, with the tiresome heist/robbery that dominates the third act only confirming The Devil’s Backbone‘s place as a hopelessly erratic piece of work. (And it doesn’t help, either, that there’s an almost total lack of scares here, which ensures that the film ultimately works neither as a historical drama nor a spooky horror flick.)

** out of ****