a review of 鬼童院

𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖕𝖙𝖔𝖇𝖊𝖗 𝖝 𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖊𝖑𝖊𝖛𝖊𝖓: A very rewarding rewatch! I don't think I truly understood enough about the Spanish Civil War (or world politics or anti-fascism, etc.) when I saw this 20-odd years ago to fully get what del Toro was doing here until now. He manages to ease us into a fairly elegant microcosm of the war (told within a story at that same war's fringes) by adding just the tiniest drop of magical realism that adds an extra moral and spiritual dimension to everything that happens, and it makes the allegory just *pop* in a way that a mundane wartime drama would never achieve.