“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.”

Set during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone follows Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a twelve year old boy who is unceremoniously dumped at a remote orphanage where an undetonated nuclear warhead protrudes from the ground and stands watch like a silent sentinel. Though he gets off on the wrong foot with the resident bully (Íñigo Garcés), he finds a friend in Doctor Casares (Federico Luppi), a rebel sympathizer who runs the orphanage with the peg-legged Carmen (Marisa Paredes). Together, Casares and Carmen oversee the war orphans as well as a stash of gold that they use to fund the war effort. Aware of its existence but not its hiding place, grown-up orphan turned caretaker Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) uses deception and then violence in a bid to claim the riches for himself, forsaking even his fiancée (Irene Visedo) in his greedy pursuit. Haunting the periphery of this personal drama is the gruesome specter of a young boy (Junio Valverde) who disappeared on the day the bomb fell from the sky. After an early foray into the American film industry with Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone finds del Toro in familiar territory, helming a Spanish language period horror film (a description that fits his debut, Cronos, as well as the well-received Pan’s Labyrinth). Coaxing strong performances from his young cast and building out his political allegory with an effective ghost story marked by unsettling environments and impressive special effects, del Toro fashions what remains one of his stronger pictures. An enchanting brew of historical tragedy and gothic fantasy that reminds us the scariest monsters are hiding in plain sight and look just like we do.