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copyright ©1999-2004
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
In the final days of the Spanish Civil War, a young boy named Carlos
finds himself unexpectedly abandoned by his tutor in the dusty crumbling
confines of the remote Santa Lucia School. As the fascists have gained
the upper hand, the school has come to function as an orphanage for boys
like Carlos -- the children of dead Republican militiamen and
politicians, people who shared the leftist political leanings of the
school's headmistress, Carmen, and headmaster, Dr. Casares. As the
adults at the school find themselves increasingly concerned about the
political climate, the children have worries of their own. A ghost has
been heard around the school. Known as The One That Sighs, the ghost
first appeared just after the strange rainy night when a fascist
warplane dropped a bomb on the school - and both the ghost and the bomb,
which continues to sit undetonated in the courtyard, have been
unsettling the boys ever since. Although the boys aren't certain, they
think the ghost might be a former student named Santi, who disappeared
on the night the bomb dropped. Santi, as it turns out, was the previous
occupant of Carlos' bed at the orphanage, and soon, Carlos finds himself
haunted by visits from the spectral boy, who appears as a mournful
white-faced form with a plume of blood wafting from his smashed head. As
Carlos gets to know more about the strange goings-on at the school, he
begins to uncover the dark secrets of both the ghost, and the school's
inhabitants.
Review
In the horror movie genre, ghosts aren't generally given the benefit of
depth. Their purpose is simple: to chill and to thrill, to leave you
scared out of your wits even as you sit on the edge of your seat, eager
to see what they'll do next. The ghost in Guillermo del Toro's
genre-bending The Devil's Backbone, however, has a greater reason for
being. As the film's opening plaints, "What is a ghost? A tragedy
condemned to repeat itself again and again." Ghosts, in del Toro's
world, aren't just scary. They're creepy and horrific, yes, but also sad
and complicated; they're the terrible things in our past that we don't
want to think about … and the things we have to acknowledge, to
confront, to understand, if we don't want to make the same mistakes in
our futures. So there are really two ghost stories in del Toro's movie,
the mystery of the murdered Santi, and the tragic loss of innocent lives
that occurred during Spain's bloody, brutal Civil War. What starts off
looking like your standard -- albeit visually spectacular --
horror/suspense flick turns into a political drama, a historical lament,
a classic melodrama, and a boy's adventure story, all deftly rolled into
a single intriguing package. In the hands of a less skillful director
and a less talented cast, the movie easily could have easily been an
incomprehensible mess. But both del Toro and his actors do a stellar job
of letting the story and characters unfold at their own natural -- and
yes, sometimes slow -- pace. Even when characters do 180-degree
turnarounds, revealing themselves to be exactly the opposite of who you
thought they were, the surprise seems totally believable, never forced.
Despite the fact that the ghost forms the core of the movie's mystery,
it's the people that provide the real intrigue. The Devil's Backbone
shows that the best ghost stories aren't really about the supernatural
at all. They're about something much more mundane and a whole lot more
interesting: plain old human beings, and the sometimes ugly, horrible
things we do. So what is a ghost? It's the side of man that we like to
pretend doesn't exist, even as it refuses to be ignored. —reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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