The pale figure of Santi, bleeding from his spectral wound, drifts through the corridors of the orphanage without a sound. He has not come to frighten. Guillermo del Toro‘s The Devil’s Backbone is a horror film that declines cheap jumps and gore, choosing instead to sit with the quiet of the Santa Lucía orphanage—where the deeper dread belongs not to the supernatural but to the human cruelty surrounding it during the last days of the Spanish Civil War.

Set in 1939, the film follows Carlos, a twelve-year-old boy delivered to the orphanage after his father’s death. Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), the Republican loyalists who run the place, preside over a household already stretched thin by the approaching Nationalist forces, and the ghost of a recently vanished boy named Santi is simply one more weight it carries. Del Toro‘s particular achievement is making both threats feel equally immediate, equally political.

The direction is precise, almost clinical. When Carlos first encounters Santi—tiptoeing through the dark kitchen at night, pitcher in hand, the air barely moving—del Toro holds the shot a beat longer than comfort allows. The ghost does not leap or shriek. It stands there, pale and wounded, and waits. That choice, restraint over spectacle, defines the film’s rhythm.

The performances hold. Fernando Tielve, in his debut as Carlos, navigates fear and stubbornness with a naturalism that never tips toward the calculated. Federico Luppi’s Dr. Casares carries an aging Republican’s weariness without sentimentality—a man who has seen too much and keeps moving anyway. Marisa Paredes gives Carmen an exhausted ferocity; her scenes in the final act carry more menace than anything the ghost provides. Eduardo Noriega’s Jacinto, the groundskeeper, is the film’s true monster: a former orphan who learned the wrong lessons, handsome and contemptible in equal measure.

The film is not without weaknesses. The middle act loses momentum as political intrigue competes for attention with the ghost story, and Jacinto’s relationship with Carmen feels underwritten—del Toro gestures at its complexity without committing to it. The ending, poignant as it is, arrives in something of a rush, as though the script accumulated more threads than the final act could accommodate.

Still, The Devil’s Backbone holds. The orphanage—crumbling, sun-bleached, its courtyard dominated by an unexploded Nationalist bomb that has never detonated—is one of the more charged spaces in recent horror cinema. That bomb is not simply a plot device; it concentrates the war’s logic in a single image: enormous, inert, and liable to go off at any moment. Del Toro and his co-writers David Muñoz and Antonio Trashorras resist the easy political allegory, letting the image do the work.

Roger Ebert wrote that the film “understands that most ghosts are sad, and are attempting not to frighten.” That reading holds here. Santi circles the orphanage not as a predator but as evidence, a figure whose presence is an accusation. The horror, when it comes, belongs to the living.

Del Toro’s later Pan’s Labyrinth invites comparison, and the connection is genuine: both films use fantasy to bring a child’s experience of wartime into focus, both draw the supernatural out of trauma rather than from nowhere. But The Devil’s Backbone operates under a harsher light. There is less wonder in it and more grief, which is why it has aged differently—less beloved, possibly, but harder to shake.

Javier Navarrete’s score contributes to this. It avoids the orchestral swells that ghost stories usually lean on, keeping instead to something quieter and unresolved, the musical equivalent of the bomb in the courtyard. The distant sounds of war—explosions, artillery—intrude at intervals, never letting the orphanage feel fully sealed off from the conflict outside its walls.

One of the film’s standout sequences is the kitchen scene, when Carlos and Jaime sneak out after curfew. The tension builds through small things—whispered dares, a pitcher of water, the creak of a door—and when Santi materializes, the silence that follows lands harder than any jump scare could. Del Toro understands that anticipation does the work. The script is full of such calibrated restraints.

The Devil’s Backbone refuses the consolations of the genre. It does not reassure. The ghosts are not vanquished, the war is not stopped, the children are not wholly safe. What del Toro offers instead is something rarer: a horror film with enough faith in its characters and its historical moment to let both carry the weight.