OK, so I make an effort to always catch up on the various movies on my HBO Max watchlist before they leave at the end of any given month, and Promising Young Woman is due to leave by then. I skipped that in theaters, partially due to the pandemic, and partially due to the fact that the subject matter–sexual assault–makes me deeply uncomfortable. Yes, I know it is supposed to. I also feared, based on the trailers, that the movie could easily veer into exploitation if not handled by a deft-enough hand. Now, the movie did come out to a lot of critical praise, and I did think I should see it eventually. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do so because, again, the subject matter makes me uncomfortable.
Instead, how about a movie with a few dead children?
It’s 1939, and Spain is in the middle of its civil war, a time that always works out well for minors in a Guillermo del Toro movies. Young Carlos (Fernando Tielve) has just been dropped off at a remote orphanage that is secretly holding onto gold for the Republican forces battling Franco’s fascists. There’s even an unexploded bomb in the center of the compound’s courtyard. As the new kid, Carlos has to learn to navigate his way around the place. Sure, most of the kids seem friendly, and Carlos himself is a stand-up kid who is willing to share his comic books and what few toys he brought with him, but there’s still resident bully Jaime (Íñigo Garcés), and Jaime may have something to do with a mysterious ghost, a boy referred to as “he who sighs” but is probably a missing orphan named Santi (Junio Valverde). Santi disappeared the night the bomb landed in the courtyard, and while the official story seems to be he ran away, Jaime is the top suspect for the other boys as to what happened.
However, this is a del Toro movie, so the supernatural elements may be more pitiable than dangerous. The real dangers are always represented by humans, most notably Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), the groundskeeper. Himself a former orphan and resident of the orphanage, Jacinto is basically staying there to hide him from the various forces that may want to draft him for the war. Despite the fact that Jacinto would seem to have a lot going for him for the time period, most notably a lovely fiancée in the form of orphanage teacher Conchita (Irene Visedo), he fills the role of malevolence in human form. The more the movie gets to know him, the nastier he looks. Jaime may be a bully, but even he can be won over with enough acts of kindness. Jactino, he wants the Republicans’ gold for himself, and he might do a lot of things to get it.
Yeah, this is really a classic bit of del Toro’s sort of work. There’s some wonder and amazement to be had in this world, spliced in as it is with the horror aspects of the ghost, but it really is a world where the strange and the mundane sit side-by-side, and the mundane is much more dangerous and deadly, as best symbolized by the unexploded bomb in the middle of the orphanage. The fact it did not explode could be seen as a miracle, but the fact very human people dropped a bomb on an orphanage in the first place should tell you who the true bad guys are. Whatever ghosts that appear in the movie are often harmless once Carlos tries talking to them, and they may even offer some level of assistance under the right circumstances. And yet, even as the movie’s villain, Jacinto is still offered some humanizing moments. His actions may be most spurred by a strong sense of abandonment when he was left at the orphanage, and the movie never forgets that, for all the awful things he does, he is still a human being in the end.
And that is where something like The Devil’s Backbone shines: it’s humanity. Santi was once a human boy, and few of the characters are wholly good or evil. The orphanage’s physician, Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), is perhaps the kindest man in the film, a man who seems to be filled with nothing but kindness and good will to his charges and a very romantic, chaste love for the orphanage’s administrator Carmen (Marisa Paredes), but even he will if pushed hard enough pick up a shotgun, fully intending to use it when the time comes. Likewise, Jaime comes across as a standard bully, but it isn’t long before he and Carlos become friends. To be human means there are moments of great good or evil within everyone, that no one is entirely one or the other, and The Devil’s Backbone demonstrates that in a particularly haunting way.
Grade: A
0 Comments