In Guillermo del Toro's "The Devil's Backbone," things don't go bump in the night, they go ka-bonkers.
This dark Spanish ghost story, by turns chilly, tough and nauseatingly violent, has no particular interest in coddling an audience. It doesn't give a damn about you people or your delicate sensibilities. It's built around the violent murder of a child, and that boy's consequent reemergence to the plain of the actual as ghostly protoplasm, hellbent on retrieving some sense of justice.
Eduardo Noriega and Irene Visedo star in "The Devil's Backbone."
(Sony Pictures Classics)
|
|
The setting is a desolate boys' school late in that vicious alphabet soup of insurrection and slaughter known as the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). This school is a haven for loyalist orphans, and also a convenient hiding place for the government's gold; meanwhile, to add to the general feelings of despair, Franco's nationalists are closing in as they wind down their victory. So everybody's on edge from the get-go.
New boy Carlos (Fernando Tielve) quickly stumbles onto to strange happenings: The headmaster is in love with his one-legged headmistress, but since he's impotent, she's also finding solace in the arms of the brutal handyman who himself is also sleeping with the cleaning woman while awaiting a chance to steal the gold. Why, that's just like any American high school! But there's more: There's the reluctance everybody has to discuss a missing boy, whose absence hangs like a pall on the place. He seems to be the one rising out of a miasma in the cellar every night to leave wet footprints about while showing off his facial ruptures from some severe beatings.
And then there's the bomb.
It looks like the latest model daisy-cutter, Osama bin Laden's new roomie, a huge blob of streamlined steel sunk in the middle of the schoolyard. Obviously it fell off a Stuka and should have blown the kids and staff to paella, but for some reason didn't go boom. Now it dominates like an 800-pound gorilla at a Style section arts staff meeting. Its sense of doom certainly promises a hot time in the old private school for orphans tonight.
One hesitates to say more; any more information might disturb the delicate tonal equilibrium of the moviegoing experience. The movie is creepy-scary, which is good, not shock-scary, which is bad. Director del Toro constructed a similar goose-pimple harvest some years back in "Cronos," then wandered astray when he went American in "Mimic," in which Mira Sorvino genetically engineered a man-eating cockroach. Now that was a stupid idea.
This film is much more atmospheric; it builds, not so much logically as viscerally, until you feel you can't escape. Lurid and overdone as it is, it's still a real disturber of the peace.
THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE (R, 106 minutes) – Contains violence directed at children and sexual innuendo. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle.
