Ranking Every Guillermo Del Toro Film From Worst To Best

A striking, paranoia-ridden, existential tale that features a formula del Toro would go on to use twice more and each time to incredibly effective results. In taking essentially two different concepts that he had lying around, he melded them together to create a whole that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Set to the backdrop of the final year of the Spanish Civil War, the film tells the tale of an orphanage and the boys who live there. At the center of the orphanage sits a defused bomb, unable to be removed. Simultaneously, it tells the story of Carlos, a boy who is new to the orphanage, and somehow makes contact with the ghostly remnants of another child.

As del Toro's third film, it is truly the cementation of del Toro's visual palette and directing style, acting as a crystalization of the tricks and trades that would come to define his work in the following years.

It is a haunting film, that reaches unexpected emotional heights in both storylines and whose strength comes from the unexpected delicacy with which the stories weave and form together. Del Toro masterfully creates a sense of tension and unease between the two parts, which only lends an even heavier credence to the informed political and religious allegory being formed.

Del Toro would go on to revisit to the era of the Spanish Civil War and even several of these themes in a film that was only a few years away from this release...