Movie #236: Spirit of the Beehive

Movie #: 236
Movie Title: Spirit of the Beehive
Year Released: 1973

Director: Victor Erice
Notable Cast: Ana Torrent, Isabel Telleria, Teresa Gimpera, Fernando Fernan Gomez

Short Description: A sensitive seven-year-old girl living in a small village in 1940 rural Spain is traumatized after viewing James Whale’s “Frankenstein” and drifts into her own fantasy world. (IMDB.com)


Rank on the Top 100 Lists

AFI.com: N/A
IMDB.com: N/A
Ranker.com: N/A
Lifed.com: N/A
Empire.com: #93
FilmCrave.com: N/A
FlickChart.com: N/A



Date Watched: 2/17/2013

What I Liked: The acting of the young girl who played Ana, the lead in the film, was well done.

What I Disliked: If a central part of the film is the fact that Ana stumbles across a wounded military deserter who she thinks is the incarnation of Frankenstein, I don’t understand why he’s in the movie for less than 5 minutes. I was intrigued when I read that in the movie’s description on Netflix and then very disappointment by the quick resolution of that plot line.  Isabel, the other young girl in the film, seemed very mentally disturbed, and the few moments that focused on that felt out of place in the film. I didn’t get the point of showing the beehive at the beginning and end of the film, other than to maybe symbolize chaos and relate that to the workings of a child’s imagination. Even then, it didn’t seem to me that Ana was overly fantasizing anything and letting her imagination get the best of her.

Grade: 1.5 out of 5 (Marginal)
Rationale: The first of back-to-back foreign language films (this one was Spanish) has me nervous to watch the next one