Fine performances, innovative effects, and the pointed backdrop of the Spanish Civil War.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 5, 2022

Del Toro considers history, politics, and art through a gothically poetic lens...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 8, 2022

The Devil's Backbone truly is a masterful film, one rife with both symbolism and story. This is a poetic piece of cinema that manages to expose the horrors of war through the lens of fantasy.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 24, 2017

A microcosm, that is like a small war, combining living and dead, resentments, betrayals and revenge in an exceptional way with an impeccable cast. [Full review in Spanish]

| Oct 31, 2016

Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone is a really cool ghost story with an extraordinary human and political dimension.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 14, 2014

Although spooky, The Devil's Backbone becomes weighed down by perhaps one too many subplots.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 8, 2014

What Del Toro provides with The Devil's Backbone is the recognition that evil exists within the most routine of circumstances. That knowledge is as old as humanity's belief in the fantastic, and just as powerful.

| Oct 7, 2013

You may find that images from this movie clamber back into your memory weeks after you see it, and give your spine a chill.

| Oct 7, 2013

Del Toro's elegant pacing and gothic touches imbue the proceedings with a cool mystery.

| Oct 7, 2013

Though the whodunnit takes a fairly predictable course, the Spanish Civil War background adds powerful narrative and symbolic weight, while the striking imagery is simply poetic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 7, 2013

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.

| Oct 7, 2013

This moody ghost story follows generally familiar lines despite its unusual historical setting, but it's imaginatively filmed and builds a sense of brooding emotional power.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 7, 2013

The Devil's Backbone augments its abundant creepiness with an equally powerful poignancy.

| Oct 7, 2013

an elegant, emotionally fraught ghost story

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 21, 2013

Pure, uncut del Toro. The filmmaker accomplishes riveting scenes of suspense and scares he honestly come by, sticking the landing of every effect he attempts. [Blu-ray]

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 12, 2013

...a hopelessly erratic piece of work.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 15, 2013

Blending terror with tenderness, Guillermo Del Toro has crafted something both traditional and original: a sun-kissed gothic horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 8, 2012

It's a schoolboy ghost story, the kind best told after lights-out.

| May 4, 2010

Though it fails in its final reels to capitalize on its early promise, pic is still stylish, accomplished and tremendously enjoyable fare.

| Oct 18, 2008

Besides being genuinely creepy, it is also surprisingly moving. It is, quite probably ... the saddest horror movie ever made.

| Jul 14, 2008