Spirits of all sorts—not just the beehive we frequently see—haunt this elliptically poetic portrait of a young girl’s inner life in a small Spanish village, set just after the country’s civil war. There are echoes of that conflict, as well as the air of suppression that came with Franco’s victory. In addition, the girl’s mother harbors the ghostly memory of a former lover. Yet Ana (Ana Torrent) is mostly haunted by 1931’s Frankenstein, which she and her slightly older sister (Isabel Telleria) watch when a traveling cinema stops near their home. Director Victor Erice, who wrote the film with Angel Fernandez Santos, literalizes Ana’s obsession during a climactic encounter with a variation on Frankenstein’s monster. Yet even before that bravura stroke, The Spirit of the Beehive bewitches with its patient, observant camera and evocative imagery (notice the recurring honeycomb pattern, including in the decorative glass of the tomb-like manor where Ana lives). Few movies have floated in this sort of space. The Spirit of the Beehive takes place within a child’s imagination, even as it’s tethered to the difficult, dangerous realities of adulthood.
(12/13/2024)
