The Devil's Backbone

When cinephiles make the trek to their local art houses, they assume that they are shunning the dreck of the multiplex for more sophisticated fare. And what could be more sophisticated than foreign films? After all, people in foreign films speak a foreign language, which is more than most Americans can do. Unfortunately, sometimes a movie comes in from overseas and defies the expectations of these cinephiles by presenting what is essentially a quality American entertainment filmed in a foreign tongue.

Such an entertainment is "The Devil's Backbone," the latest horror film directed by Guillermo del Toro ("Cronos," "Mimic"). It's not sophisticated, and it's not particularly subtle. del Toro has technique to burn, however, and he burns it on the pyre of scaring you senseless in this tale of perhaps-malignant haunting and certainly-unwelcome revenge. And "The Devil's Backbone" delivers the tension, the gore and the righteous climaxes, if you like that stuff. It's just that its natural audience probably doesn't.

Anyway. Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is a studious, likable little boy who has the misfortune of growing up with Communist parents during the Spanish Civil War. After they are killed, Carlos is dropped unceremoniously at Santa Lucia, an orphanage which houses young victims of similar ideology-related misfortunes in the middle of a desert. Santa Lucia is run by people with their own dark secrets, shadowy nests of conflicting loyalties that del Toro (with the aid of co-screenwriters Antonio Trashorras and David Muñoz) eventually brings to light. Carlos himself is more concerned about the "one who sighs," who seems preoccupied with doing ghosty things like casting shadows and rustling curtains and knocking over ewers. When Carlos corners the ghost, however, he starts making dire prophecies about upcoming deaths. Without wanting to ruin anything, these are prophecies the ghost himself will not fulfill. That's going to fall to the adults.

The ghost chasing, as the above summary may have indicated, is pretty damn tedious, no matter how luxuriant the palette cinematographer Guillermo Navarro uses or how carefully del Toro edits the sequences. When we get into one of the adults taking revenge, however, things pick up. We get the cold-eyed determination of Carmen (Marisa Paredes), the headmistress who was once devoted to the cause but now seems devoted to survival above all else; the grand passion and kindly nature of Casares (Frederico Luppi), who tries to find his as-yet-untested reserve; and the hot hard rage of Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), whose resentment about his childhood stay in Santa Lucia has never stayed far from his mind. Who does bad things? I'm not telling. All I can say is that they fight each other really, really well, showing the resources that made them such striking actors in what were indisputably better movies than this one.

And this is not a good film as such. The boys are pretty much interchangeable, with only Carlos and the bully Jaime (Inigo Garces) more than bodies to fill child-size beds, and the somewhat stilted exposition hampers the efforts of the adults to get us to care about them. The Spanish Civil War serves more as a backdrop than an actual presence in the film. (The subtitles, featuing hilarious spelling errors like "Of all the orphans, you were the daddest," don't help.) But the final thirty minutes or so are as grisly and tension-packed and riveting as you could want, and if your pulse isn't pounding during the finale, you're just never going to enjoy a horror film. One hopes not too many of those people see "The Devil's Backbone," but if horror-film people get up in the art house, they'll be glad they made the trip.

You should try to avoid screaming "DAMN! DON'T DO THAT!", though.

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