The Devil's Backbone

del Toro builds excitement, dread, and melodrama in equal layers.

del Toro builds excitement, dread, and melodrama in equal layers.

With the ambitious and ominous The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro rises to a new level of accomplishment, adding history and politics to his distinctive blend.

With the ambitious and ominous The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro rises to a new level of accomplishment, adding history and politics to his distinctive blend.

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.

Mr. del Toro provokes your screams and shudders, but he also earns your tears.

Mr. del Toro provokes your screams and shudders, but he also earns your tears.

Del Toro has made a ghost story that's not only evocative and original, it's a pleasure to watch.

It's a horror flick, and a creepily good one, that also functions as an allegory of the war that still haunts Spain seven decades later.

The movie is an expert, sunlit chiller audaciously predicated on an unquiet historical memory: "What is a ghost?"