During the Spanish Civil War an isolated orphanage meekly provides for its children while also giving some support to the Republican cause. A young boy named Carlos is dropped off by his so-called tutor after his father is killed in the war, unbeknownst to him. Carlos immediately finds himself being bullied. A large unexploded bomb resides in the orphanage’s courtyard. The ghost of a recently deceased orphan haunts the buildings. Jacinto, a worker at the orphanage, is ashamed of having been brought up there and has plans to make something of himself, regardless of who gets in his way. That’s the basic setup and it leads me to my major problem with the film.
Some of these elements are downright inconsequential to the telling of the story. I have no idea why this film required a ghost. The real story isn’t about the ghost, even though that’s largely what the first half of the film focuses on. Rather, the story is about Jacinto’s greed and its impact on the orphanage. He’s trying to get into the orphanage’s safe where he believes Republican gold is stashed and that this will allow him to become his own man. Kept secret for a little more than half the film, it’s Jacinto who killed the missing orphan Santi in an act of violence that goes further than intended, all because Santi saw Jacinto attempting to get into the safe. All of the plot’s momentum will come from this goal. He disposes of the body and the haunting begins, but ghost Santi only ever approaches the other orphans. As with most ghost stories, Santi spends way too much time scaring the hell out of his potential allies rather than demonstrating that he comes in peace and seeks help.
Long story short, by the time the audience and most of the children learn that Jacinto isn’t just a bit of a dick but also a greedy murderer he’s already attacked the orphanage caretakers and blown up the room with the safe. Revenge for their friend’s death is no longer a primary concern, now it’s just to survive this madman who eventually disposes of all the adults and locks the children up. In what could be a great climax where these children escape and kill Jacinto all on their own, a new ghost (of a just killed caretaker) enters the picture to briefly help them. Not only is this fairly random and disappointing, but it’s only necessary in the plot because one child rolls his ankle dropping out of a window on his way to freeing the others. Why not just let the kids succeed on their own? And why not just use Santi to open their door instead of introducing a second ghost? For all the setup, Santi doesn’t even figure into the climax except for Jacinto being killed in such a way as to see Santi’s body in his last moments.
For all of the tangents and set dressing, The Devil’s Backbone is just about a greedy man abusing an orphanage. The ghost story, the religious symbology, the Spanish Civil War backdrop, the specific recurring imagery of the undetonated bomb, the sexual intrigue between some of the adults, etc., none of it really informs that main story. Writer/director Guillermo del Toro desperately needed to decide whether he wanted to explore the supernatural elements of this world, which populate the film’s first half, or the story of human survival, which takes up the second half. As it is, you’ve got one story with no end and another with an underdeveloped beginning.
There’s a nice little scene where the head caretaker, Dr. Casares, tells Carlos the superstition about a rum that ages in bottles with human fetuses with “devil’s backbones”. As will forever be the case, floating fetuses in jars will always be disturbing and creepy (see Carnivàle and Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom). The superstition involves these unborn babies, with their visible spines, never having meant to be born, but if you drink rum infused with their spirit, it can cure your ailments. Maybe this can be stretched into a metaphor wherein facing Santi’s ghost helps Carlos face up to Jacinto, but it’s tenuous at best, as are most of the links between Jacinto’s story and the film’s supernatural elements.
The Devil’s Backbone feels like a brainstorming session that didn’t get fleshed out. Del Toro throws ideas and images against the wall and hopes they’ll not only stick but form something cohesive. I’m left wanting a film that either embraces the supernatural motifs or excises them in favor of the reality-based drama. Unfortuantely, it’s an awkward hybrid that I viewed.
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