Reviews now on YouTube! | Watch here

Larsen On Film

  • Review Library
  • Subscribe
  • Why I’m Wrong
  • About
  • Books

The Spirit of the Beehive

 

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)

Recent Reviews

Yojimbo (1961)

Comedy Rated NR

“Although swords strike and blood flows, Yojimbo mostly registers as a comedy.”

Love & Basketball (2000)

Drama Rated PG-13

“If someone knows the one true thing about you, that might be enough for a life together.”

Tampopo (1985)

Comedy Rated NR

“Itami squeezes Japanese food customs, even as he offers a fondly humorous survey of them.”


Search Review Library

Sponsored by the following | become a sponsor



SUBSCRIBE


Sign up to receive emails

Sign up to get new reviews and updates delivered to your inbox!

Please wait...

Thank you for signing up!




FOLLOW ONLINE



All rights reserved. All Content ©2024 J. Larsen
maintained by Big Ocean Studios

TOP