THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE 

Review: A twelve year old boy is taken to an ominous boy’s orphanage, whose father has died in the Spanish Civil War. He is given the bed of missing orphan Santi also known as ‘the one who sighs’. Gradually Carlos uncovers the dark ties that bind the residents of the school. Also including the secret that haunts them all; a student named ‘Santi’, who was brutally murdered.
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Actors: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Inigo Garces, Irene Visedo, Francisco Maestre, Junio Valverde, Miguel Ortiz and Juan Carlos Vellido
Year: 2001
Genre: Art House, Drama, Horror and International
Conclusion: 4/5
Directed by the fantastic Guillermo del Toro, who has directed other films such as The Shape of Water (2017) and also Pacific Rim (2013). The Devil’s Backbone is a project he really believed in. He returned to the script after he had put it on the back burner for 16 years. The themes include the ghosts of history and the freedom of the imagination. It is also about the relationship between the real and the imagined and also between pain and beauty, death and rebirth, damnation and salvation. The late film critic Roger Ebert described this film as “a mournful and beautiful ghost story that understands that most ghosts are sad and are attempting not to frighten us but to urgently communicate something that must be known so that they can rest”.