Classic Ghost Story The Devil's Backbone Works on Every Level

The Mexican director Guillermo del Toro isn't in the weight class of a Welles or Kubrick, but he works in the same complete, visionary tradition. His earlier films, Cronos and Mimic, were far from perfect (parts of Mimic were just plain trashy), but they suggested a ferociously complex talent that could compete, and perhaps best, those of some of the finest horror and fantasy filmmakers working today. His latest work, The Devil's Backbone, is easily his finest film. This ghost story set at an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War doesn't just creep the bejesus out of you, it dazzles you with well-timed shocks and eerily beautiful images of mortality, longing and loss. It welds every scene and every shot to every other scene and shot, so that every scene and shot echo and enlarge the rest.

The result works on multiple levels: as a classical ghost story, a murder mystery, a boys' adventure, an inquiry into the roots of violence and a political fable strongly rooted in a certain time and place. The opening credits juxtapose images of a deformed fetus floating in amber, plus disconnected flashes of horror: explosives dropping from the bay of a bomber; a boy bound with ropes, drowning in brackish water. These strobe-flash compositions are dazzling all by themselves, but unlike so many modern credits sequences, they're not a stand-alone appetizer. They connect to the rest of the movie?a combination horror film/detective story in which the ghost of a murdered child latches onto a new arrival at the orphanage and infects his mind with images that drive him to unravel a mystery.

The new arrival is Carlos (well played by Fernando Tielve); he's dropped off at the orphanage by a friend of his father, an antifascist fighter killed in the war. Without giving too much away?always a risk when reviewing this sort of movie?let's say that he's haunted by a child who died under mysterious circumstances, perhaps at the hands of some of the same people who are now watching over Carlos and his classmates.

Del Toro, who cowrote the script with Antonio Trashorras and David Munoz, finds a balance between the unconscious-teasing fairytale and the psychologically plausible melodrama. Every major player in this story is simultaneously larger-than-life and human-scaled: Carlos' bullying but tenderhearted classmate, Jaime (Inigo Garces), who knows more about the murder than he lets on; headmistress Carmen (Marisa Paredes), a leftist poet's widow who fears the orphanage will be destroyed by the fascists because of its empathy for the other side; the strapping young caretaker Jacinto (mesmerizing hunk Eduardo Noriega), a cynical opportunist whose only loyalty is to himself, and who is described by another character as "a prince without a kingdom"; Conchita (Irene Visedo), the lovely young cook who's having an affair with Jacinto even though she knows he's using her; and Casares (the great character actor Federico Luppi), a poetry-quoting professor who adores the headmistress but doesn't dare say so.

The film's title refers to spina bifida, which in the 1930s was thought of as a curse rather than a condition. The fetus glimpsed in the opening credits has a deformed spine that peeks through the flesh of its back. As the aged Casares explains, the remains of such accursed children are used to make the equivalent of a magic potion, which the superstitious drink to heal all sorts of sickness (including impotence). Like all useful metaphors, this one is open-ended; it links the accursed condition of the devil's backbone to the school's impoverished, fearful orphans; their politically endangered adult protectors; the endangered orphanage itself; and the larger concept of war as an accursed condition?one that many of its participants insist can heal a sick society.

Yet this is just one rewarding image; The Devil's Backbone boasts so many they can't be listed here, and they all work in conjunction with one another. A fleeting image shows Carlos at a lunch table meticulously cracking the skin off a hardboiled egg?a metaphor for his own role in this detective story. The courtyard of the orphanage is dominated by a huge, unexploded bomb that fell from the sky on the night when the ghost child was murdered. The dropping of the bomb had no direct connection to the child's murder, yet at a deep, symbolic level they're fused together: war is the death of childhood, and the unexploded bomb links with the unexplored mystery of the ghost child's death. A chillingly brilliant sequence of shots makes the connection clear: a piece of ribbon tied to the bomb tears loose in a mysterious breeze, then leads a child to answers. The finale is an orgy of Old Testament butchery that takes violence seriously?and suggests that all humans are capable of it. The film's many deaths are frightening and sad, never pretty; besides desert wind and spectral whispers, the most common recurring soundtrack noise is the malevolent buzz of flies.

Del Toro works in color, but he has a black-and-white filmmaker's sensitivity to the meanings of darkness and light. Except for Spielberg, no contemporary filmmaker uses shadows and silhouettes with greater impact. The inky gloom that enfolds the ghost and the children at night suggests Roman Polanski; when blackened foreground characters stare out at the bright Spanish plains, we're in John Ford country. Del Toro and his cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (Jackie Brown, Spy Kids) strike a balance between modernistic Steadicam prowling and old-fashioned, nailed-to-the-floor compositions, arranging windows, doors, furniture and performers in ways that give us wordless information about this world, its inhabitants and their prickly relationship to history (theirs and Europe's). It's the most complete and complex genre movie of the year?the best horror movie, the best fantasy movie and one of the best films, period.