The Devil's Backbone

Aroview: An elegant amalgam of melodrama and horror movie set in a boys orphanage during the Spanish Civil War that is rich in baroque atmospherics, and features a high-profile Spanish cast.

Dir. Guillermo Del Toro achieves creepy more than scary, here replaying his trademark motifs (Catholic angst, duplicity, and entomology) for a story (as the director claims) “not about ghosts, but with them”, the horror elements becoming secondary to its nobler ambitions as a political allegory and wartime melodrama of desperation and betrayal.