The Devil’s Backbone

This emotionally layered Spanish-language production, set towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, recounts the tale of a boy who is sent to a haunted rural orphanage after his freedom-fighter father is killed. Demonstrating the director’s ability to transfer from notebook to screen his singular vision (while displaying a love of Hitchcock and Buñuel), this seminal work is a provocative synthesis of historical melodrama, murder mystery and a chilling, gothic ghost story.