A frightening tale of 12-year-old Carlos, who, after the death of his father, ends up at Santa Lucia High School in the care of principal Carmen and Professor Casares. The boy’s father was a rebel killed in a battle against the Franco regime. Although the orphanage is overburdened with a large number of children, the school principal sympathetically accepts young Carlos.

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Scorched yellow earth… The endless, stretching to the horizon… A thin thread of road running into the distance… A sturdy old building enclosed by a stone fence, a dusty courtyard… In the courtyard, with its nose in the ground, leaning slightly sideways under its own weight, a huge, red, rusty aerial bomb is sticking out. It was dropped one terrible night. Nobody knows why it didn’t explode. But if you put your ear to its red-hot body, you can hear how it either taps or ticks or breathes. It’s alive… A living evil, lurking for the time being…

And there’s a war going on somewhere beyond that fence… That’s where the men have gone, leaving their sons in this godforsaken orphanage… From there comes the news of their dead parents, From there across the dusty road comes the occasional carload of unkind people or unfortunate news… There’s nothing good to look forward to… no food, no money, no attention to abandoned children…

Here, behind thick stone walls, in a former church building, the boys await their fate… Kids and teens from 5 to 15, and each of them still believes in the miracle that someday their parents will walk through the gates of this orphanage and take them home… and there will be peace… and there will be no war…

The boys are still boys… They fumble in the dust, pick slugs in the basement by the cool, inviting well, exchange pre-war comic books, study self-drawn pictures of naked girls, they fight and fight among themselves, test each other for lousiness, to see who is capable of meanness and treachery and who is made of strong dough… …and dare the newcomers to go on dangerous night raids…

And yet they’re all afraid… Afraid of one of the adults who looks after them, afraid of the strange semi-criminal personalities who come periodically to their gates… But most of all, the boys are afraid of the one who sighs… Because it is almost impossible to see him, but his presence is always palpable – wet footprints appear on the floor, you can see a shadow running along the wall, huge scissors hanging on hooks in the kitchen move by themselves, water jars break in the bedroom… And the adult educators don’t believe that HE exists… He is real. And he’s a ghost… Is he dangerous? Or is he himself the victim of someone else’s evil?

What tragedy made him stay here without flying to heaven? What pain did he endure as a living man? HOW did he become a ghost? What feelings does the Ghost experience, if he is capable of experiencing anything? How is it that he appears to the boys as a fuzzy picture, blurry and instantly disappearing? What does he want…? Revenge? Justice? Punishment? So many questions overwhelm the inquisitive boys, some of whom know a little more than the others, but keep silent for fear of being killed… And others, inquisitive and fearless, unearth and connect the scraps of one terrible night… Mystery ceases to be mystery… Evil ceases to be contained…

Evil spread across the orphanage yard, overflowing the heart of one who craves riches… Greed has swallowed up humanity… Masks are cast off, the wolf’s mouth is gnawed… Brutality bursts forth… Rage is unleashed on those around them… And war begins. A war of our own. Not one that involves planes and bombs, but one that is confined to the stone fence of the yard… Shots are heard, and innocent blood stains the blade of the knife, and gasoline canisters explode… A huge column of black smoke rising to the sky… and little burnt corpses in the dust of the courtyard where, 24 hours ago, the boys were playing peacefully… And the sharp shards of glass that had embedded themselves in tender children’s backs… And the twisted legs… and the blood pulsing from an open artery… and glassy eyes staring back from whence they never return…

And what about the adults? Those who were supposed to save children’s lives? The adults were incapable of protecting the children from the horror. The head of the orphanage, an iron lady with a steel leg, thinks about rebels and gold, she cannot make sense of her feelings, overwhelmed by passions and desires…

The old teacher is too old, though he stands to the end with a rifle in his hand… and does his best… But he’s not strong enough against a young, swollen rage… And neither poems that he knows by heart, nor hundreds of books that he has read in his life, nor creepy embryos with a backbone of the devil – sharpened, as in dragons, vertebrae, poured with a special solution in his laboratory, will help him… They say that if you drink that solution from the bottle, the infirm will gain strength and many diseases will go away…

The Devil’s Backbone… According to legend, such a backbone occurs in children who are unwanted by their parents. Such children are not initially given the amount of love needed to become a normal person… If you think about it, maybe a lot of people should have such a spine… And so would the main villain, yet his back is straight and beautiful. Outwardly he is built like a god, this prince without a kingdom, and only in the greedy gleam of his cold eyes can you see the devil himself…

As it seems to me, the backbone of the devil is ugliness, which is revealed sometimes not in a man’s appearance, but in his actions, terrible and inexplicable in their cruelty…

The surviving boys… What did they come out of that battle with? Would their hearts harden after their hands were held by sharpened wooden stakes? Would their souls grow the same devilish chains? Would they be able to remain human?

They walked out the gate of the ruined orphanage, leaving behind them the corpses of their friends, the memory of the ghost, and the memory of the one who had sought the gold… In front of them a dusty road, running away to the horizon through the scorched steppe… What will the great land greet them with? What will they breathe in with the red-hot wind of a warring homeland? Who knows?…

And that huge aerial bomb was still ticking away in the yard of the orphanage. Evil under the scorching sun… Evil lurking for the time being…

Bravo, Guillermo Del Toro… Bravo…

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (79.0 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Audio
Spanish: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 16-bit)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0

Subtitles
English, English SDH.